The emotional and cognitive response to the artworks of Raja Ravi Varma, one of India’s most celebrated 19th-century painters, is discussed in the International Journal of Arts and Technology. Varma was known for blending European academic realism with traditional Indian themes, and so his paintings achieved a long-held significance not only for their aesthetics but also for their ability to resonate with a broad cross-cultural audience. Indeed, while Varma’s paintings are often iconic in their depiction of Hindu deities and their representation of mythological narratives, many have been mass-produced and become accessible to the public as well as art collectors.
Dyutiman Mukhopadhyay and Sangeetha Menon of the National Institute of Advanced Studies in Bengaluru, Sohhom Bandyopadhyay of the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar in Gujarat, and Eshwar Venkatesh of the Manipal Academy of Higher Education in Manipal (Bengaluru Campus), India, have looked at the aesthetics of Varma’s paintings using both Western and Indian theories of art to probe the emotional and perceptual responses of viewers.
The team used eye-tracking and saliency analysis to map how a viewer’s gaze moves across Varma’s paintings, and then link those eye movement patterns to the viewer’s emotional reactions. In the context of Indian aesthetics, the work considers Rasa theory which defines various emotional sentiments provoked by art such as joy and love, sorrow and anger, and wonder. Rasa theory suggests that one’s emotional experience of art is not a simple, passive reception of visual information, but a dynamic, active engagement shaped by personal and cultural contexts. In many ways, this contrasts with the conventional Western approach to empirical aesthetics, which might seem simplistic in some ways, although there is always scope for a wider perspective within any culture.
The team suggests that their findings show that there is an intricate interplay between cognitive, emotional, and perceptual factors and how a viewer experiences a given piece of art. Indeed, an individual’s emotional response is influenced by their own creativity and their prior exposure to art. Art appreciation is always subjective. In the context of this research, the team has found that one’s experience plays a vital role in defining the aesthetic experience. This has implications for art appreciation, scholarship, and perhaps even how we display art and how the public engages with it.
Mukhopadhyay, D., Bandyopadhyay, S., Venkatesh, E. and Menon, S. (2024) ‘Exploring complexity-entropy, eye-tracking, experience, creativity, familiarity, and emotional responses to 40 paintings of Raja Ravi Varma – father of Indian modern art’, Int. J. Arts and Technology, Vol. 15, No. 2, pp.170–207.