Lorenzo Bartalesi on Evolutionary Aesthetics and the Naturalization of Humanistic Knowledge

In an interview with Artribune, philosopher Lorenzo Bartalesi discusses evolutionary aesthetics, a field that applies Darwinian evolution to aesthetic facts. He distinguishes two main models: the preferential model, focused on sexual and environmental preferences (e.g., facial symmetry, water), and the expressive model, emphasizing affective, pre-symbolic, and multimodal cognition (e.g., play, mother-infant communication). Bartalesi argues for integrating both models to account for the complexity of aesthetic behavior, from animal mate choice to human art. He traces the history of the debate on animal sense of beauty, from Darwin and Wallace to contemporary biologists like Prum and Voland. Bartalesi also addresses the origin of art, rejecting the idea of a Paleolithic renaissance and proposing that aesthetic behaviors co-evolved with cognitive capacities, making Homo aestheticus a precursor to Homo symbolicus. The interview references key works: Bartalesi's own "Estetica evoluzionistica" (Carocci, 2012), Voland and Grammer's "Evolutionary aesthetics" (2003), and the Venus of Hohle Fels (c. 35,000 years old).