As a practicing psychiatrist for the past 30 years I have a great interest in the development of human emotions. This amazing book by Mr. Brener opened new vistas to me about how our more refined emotions developed.

Mr. Brener begins with the observation that there was a virtual absence of the human face in cave art, followed by primitive emotionless, vacuous faces in two dimensional art(with occasional exceptions) until the Renaissance when faces in three dimensions expressing the nuances of complex emotions appeared. He offers various hypotheses and supporting evidence from a wide range of sources. These sources include art history, history, psychology, neurology, biology, evolution, and literature,among others.

One striking hypothesis is that the capacity for artists to see and paint the world in three dimensions is the consequence of evolutionary changes in the right brain. Another is that a new range of emotional expession became available to mankind and required for it's development the new space of the third dimension. The capacity to see the beauty of the face(and person)expanded. Emotions that bind and connect human beings such as empathy developed. Mr. Brener argues that it was the deveopment of empathy that led to the decline of behaviors such as human sacrifice and slavery.

I found the idea that the evolution of perception and emotion has been going on over the past 1000 years to be a fascinating one. The range of disciplines Mr Brener visits to support his case is impressive. His ideas of the development of our more refined emotions is most interesting.

This book is a fascinating journey into depth.