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Multisensory Experience of Paintings Cover

Multisensory Experience of Paintings

Estetika: The European Journal of Aesthetics

Volume 62 (2025): Issue 1

By: René Jagnow

Open Access

|Mar 2025

Abstract

In this paper, I will argue that certain figurative paintings – namely, paintings that depict atmospheres, such as Camille Pissarro’s Snowscape in Louveciennes (1872), can elicit multisensory experiences in their viewers. Viewing such pictures under appropriate circumstances will activate the viewers’ sensory imagination in such a way that they enjoy a genuine multisensory experience. Such an experience does not just involve different sensible qualities. Rather, the different sensible qualities are fused together into a new sensible quality that cannot be experienced through a single sense modality or through the mere co-consciousness of multiple sense modalities.

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.33134/eeja.460 | Journal eISSN: 2571-0915

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Language: English

Page range: 17 - 35

Submitted on: Nov 11, 2023

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Accepted on: Sep 24, 2024

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Published on: Mar 18, 2025

Published by: Helsinki University Press

In partnership with: Paradigm Publishing Services

Keywords:

experience of paintings,

multisensory experience,

© 2025 René Jagnow, published by Helsinki University Press
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Volume 62 (2025): Issue 1

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