Correction: The aesthetic experience of the sublime for a group of Highly Sensitive Persons: Maselli's figurative style vs. Rothko's abstract expressionism

Abstract

10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1609994 can create and constitute a unique experiential place of variable forms (Falk, 2009), where visitors are encouraged to participate in aesthetic interpretation with their own creative skill. According to an experiential approach, the present research focuses on the challenge that museums face to foster the viewer's significant experience to artwork (Barnes and McPherson, 2019).In connection with the above, the aim of this study is to analyze the relationship between the visitors' aesthetic experience and their engagement with the sublime through two different works of art, given that aesthetic and transcendent or spiritual experiences are intimately related (as it will be explained in more detail below). This research and its conclusions are based on a sample of individuals belonging to a group of Highly Sensitive Persons that, as discussed in Section 5, are characterized by a particular aesthetic sensitivity and a strong capacity for deriving deep and transcendent meanings from Art.Visitor involvement in art contemplation is not a recent claim, as in 1925 the Spanish philosopher Ortega Gasset (2010, p. 310) had already argued for the need of pause, detention and slow contemplation in art interpretation vs. quick glazing and passing by the art object. Contemplation is a gate to experience. "We must teach observation" César Manrique used to say (Gómez, 1990). It is through the education of our sight that we can reach the "communication with objects" (Yenawine, 2013, p. 39) and capture possible messages. Art experience requires visual dialogue between viewer and artwork at the deepest levels of insight, in which first sensitive arousal evolves progressively into emotional, cognitive and meta-cognitive response, ultimately becoming what Pelowski and Akiba (2011) call "transformative aesthetic experience."In order to foster this kind of experience a museum facilitator faces a challenge similar to that of the artist when trying to communicate immaterial experience through material form. Facilitators must design proposals according to viewer immaterial features and object material features, since both, subject and object, together determine educational experience as well as aesthetic experience, in the sense that these two experiences mean novelty and genuine human growth (Dewey, 1934). However, strong experiences like transformative aesthetic experiences always emerge in a particular, intimate, unexpected way for each human being, meaning the educator never has guarantee or total control over it and only approximation is possible, by means of designing, planning, and implementing best conditions for it to succeed.Previous research has addressed the use of art to generate an experience of the Sublime. The study of Stamatopoulou et al. (2024) is a solid example that exposes the interplay of the aesthetic and the spiritual, using religious paintings and exploring the reaction of a range of participants to them. The question is whether other forms and subjects of art, beyond strictly religious ones, may serve as appropriate sublime stimuli to foster a similar experience to the one provoked by religious art, a possibility already suggested by the aforementioned authors. Fingerhut and Prinz (2018, p. 122-123) also raise the question of whether any artistic genre can elicit awe (intimately connected to the Sublime experience), an issue that we seek to address through a case study in this article.Aesthetic education bases on the idea that human life is sensitive to the qualities of the material world and to how these qualities relate to each other (Eisner, 2002). Since art is about the mastery of relating qualities, its contemplation offers the best opportunities for aesthetic education. Art sensibility has to do with material physical perception as well as immaterial psychological perception, as arousal connects with emotion and cognition making. For this reason, it is said that art can profoundly touch and change lives.According to the model of "transformative aesthetic experience" of Pelowski and Akiba (2011), true art contemplation is a complex phenomenon that goes beyond assimilating art information. It is neither self-escape nor any other kind of evasion from the real world. On the contrary, it demands overcoming initial cognitive disruption and discrepancy, by deeply touching the inner self (Vining and Merrick, 2012).The aesthetic experience may be essential for a deeper understanding of the world around us and of ourselves. Effectively, art is not merely an aesthetic object to be enjoyed, contemplated, or received in a subjective and individual manner, isolated from life and knowledge. Rather, it constitutes a mode of understanding and an encounter with truth and with the world. Art is a manifestation of truth in an existential or revelatory sense (Gadamer, 1989).Teaching and learning to contemplate an art object requires attention to different dimensions of the person that integrate together to produce what is called the aesthetic experience. In this regard, we can say that "There is much more body and much more soul to be rendered if you have the will" (Bumgarner, 2004). Fingerhut and Prinz (2018) refer to intense and complex engagements triggered by the emotion of wonder, in which cognitive, perceptual, and spiritual components can be identified, and, when sufficiently strong, may culminate in an experience of awe. Bearing this in mind, we refer to the body dimensions: sensitive, emotional, cognitive, and spiritual.The concept of the Sublime first appears in an anonymous work attributed to Longinus from the 1st century AD, On the Sublime, which approaches it from the perspective of literary genres rather than aesthetics. In one of its chapters, an analysis of the figure of the Sublime is included in relation to the vastness of the cosmos, though linked to humanity and not the external world. In 1756, the British philosopher Edmund Burke (2017Burke ( [orig. 1756]]) revisits this idea. He conducts an empirical analysis of aesthetic terms that remain undefined. Burke focuses on identifying and differentiating the Beautiful and the Sublime, which he sees as qualities that are recognizable in objects. He defines the Sublime as a controlled fear that attracts the soul, present in qualities such as vastness, infinity, emptiness, solitude, or silence. According to Burke, nature has the capacity to provoke extreme emotional states in the subject, introspectively their deepest in that 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1609994 and In to the the Sublime the of and the of and of the the philosopher ( [orig. these of the Beautiful and Sublime. 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