Beauty and Care: What Art Can Bring to Medicine

An English adaptation and scientific expansion of Massimo Fioranelli’s Italian reflection “La bellezza come cura”, originally published in January 2023.

More than an explanation of suffering

Medicine asks why we suffer and how suffering might be relieved. Yet a person’s life cannot be exhausted by mechanisms, diagnoses and causes. It also takes shape through images, memories, places and encounters that carry meaning.

The original Italian reflection draws on James Hillman’s challenge to a psychology that overlooks beauty. The question is philosophical before it is therapeutic: what is lost when a discipline concerned with suffering becomes indifferent to lived experience?

A painting, music or a meaningful image can invite another kind of attention. Rather than demanding an immediate explanation, it may allow someone to pause, recognise a feeling or experience life from another perspective. Whether a particular activity produces a measurable health benefit is a separate research question.

What research tells us

The WHO’s 2019 scoping review mapped more than 3,000 studies of arts engagement and health, ranging from small uncontrolled projects to longitudinal studies and randomised trials. This breadth supports taking the arts seriously in care, but does not mean that every activity has the same effect or that all claims rest on equally strong evidence.¹

A 2025 systematic review focused on viewing visual art. It included 38 papers and 6,805 participants. The authors found converging evidence for eudemonic well-being, concerning meaning and flourishing, but no strong support across the other well-being outcomes examined. Settings, activities and measurements varied, and more rigorous methods were needed.²

In a 2022 comparative study, 84 participants viewed either an online Monet presentation or a display of Japanese culinary traditions. Both were followed by improvements in several self-reported measures after brief exposure, without a difference between exhibitions. This suggests an interesting question about short-term cultural engagement; it does not establish a specific effect of painting or a lasting treatment benefit.³

Experience and clinical outcomes

Feeling calmer, finding meaning and improving the course of a disease are different outcomes. They should not be treated as interchangeable. A physiological change is also not, by itself, evidence that an intervention prevents clinical events.

The practical challenge is to make room for cultural experience while asking precise questions about benefit, duration and context. Preferences matter: the same artwork may comfort one person and leave another indifferent or distressed.

A place for beauty in care

As an editorial perspective, beauty belongs in medicine because the person receiving care is more than a biological problem. Attention to images, language and surroundings can be part of taking that person seriously, without promising that art will cure illness.

Clinical science and the humanities can remain in conversation, preserving scientific judgment alongside the depth of human experience.

About Massimo Fioranelli · Cardiology, internal medicine and the humanities

References

Fancourt D, Finn S. What is the evidence on the role of the arts in improving health and well-being? A scoping review. Copenhagen: WHO Regional Office for Europe; 2019. Report 67. Report.
Trupp MD, Howlin C, Fekete A, Kutsche J, Fingerhut J, Pelowski M. The impact of viewing art on well-being—a systematic review of the evidence base and suggested mechanisms. J Posit Psychol. 2025;20(6):978–1002. doi:10.1080/17439760.2025.2481041.
Trupp MD, Bignardi G, Chana K, Specker E, Pelowski M. Can a brief interaction with online, digital art improve wellbeing? Front Psychol. 2022;13:782033. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2022.782033.