Le ragioni estetiche dell'arte preistorica. Attualità di Ragghianti.

Starting from the research carried out by Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti on the ‘mental reasons’ of 81 paleo-historical image-making and some of his topical insights on the relationship between language, thought and figuration, the article aims to present a hypothesis on the role of the aesthetic attitude in human cognitive evolution. In the terminological shift suggested by Ragghianti from Homo sapiens to Homo conscius, Vico’s call to restore the character of authentically logical, speculative, and constructive thinking to human expressiveness is renewed. The art historian’s objective of configuring the relationship between consciousness, image and knowledge in aesthetic terms is pursued here through a definition of the aesthetic as a form of proto-cognition, emotionally saturated and cognitively indeterminate, which participates in the emergence of signification and the human capacity to produce images. In support of this hypothesis, alongside a presentation of the often forgotten Darwinian thesis of the evolutionary anteriority of the animal sense of beauty over language, some recent experimental research on the attentional processes involved in human aesthetic experiences is presented.