From the caves of Lascaux to the halls of contemporary galleries, art has stood as humanity’s mirror, an intimate dance between the eternal and the ephemeral. Carl Jung described the collective memory as a shared unconscious, a vast ocean of archetypes and symbols that connect us to the roots of our essence. Art, in its purest form, acts as a bridge to this unconscious, a spark igniting memories not of the individual but of humanity itself. How else can we explain the universality of the circle, the spiral, the human figure? In each stroke and figure lies a primal whisper, an echo of the founding myths that have guided generations. As Mircea Eliade suggested, art “reactualises” the sacred, returning to the modern individual a memory that seems forgotten but continues to pulse in the depths of existence.
From a scientific perspective, art can also be understood as a powerful tool within the neuroscience of memory. Recent studies in cognitive science have demonstrated that exposure to certain artworks activates not only areas of the brain associated with visual processing but also those linked to emotion and autobiographical memory. When observing a piece—a painted landscape, a portrait laden with mystery—the neural connections forged awaken emotions long buried, some not even belonging to the individual’s own experience but to inherited patterns. This transference of shared memory explains why, when gazing upon Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory, the viewer feels not only the passage of time but also an almost universal anguish at its fleeting nature. Art does not merely record history; it revives it within each observer.
Yet the true power of art lies not only in its ability to preserve memory but also in its capacity to intervene in human lives and transform them. The philosopher Walter Benjamin, in his seminal essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, observed that the aura of an original artwork establishes a unique connection between the spectator and the object. That aura is the very manifestation of collective memory, a portal to an experience that transcends the tangible. Poets, from Baudelaire to Octavio Paz, have celebrated art as a form of dialogue with time, a silent conversation between past and present. Thus, art is not mere documentation; it is intervention and epiphany. It is the act of remembering together, as humanity, and of giving shape to forgetfulness. In every brushstroke, every verse, every chord, resonates the possibility of being something greater than individuals: we are a whole that unfolds and discovers itself in the hands of artists who, generation after generation, bring us back to the fire that never died.
