Starry Night, a well-known painting by Vincent van Gogh, has recently been analyzed by scientists and the work is more complex than it first appears. An investigation of the painting's brushstrokes indicates that its tumultuous, swirling sky has many characteristics in common with unseen fluid dynamics processes in our real-world atmosphere.
In June 1889, Van Gogh completed Starry Night while residing in a hospital in southern France, recuperating from a mental collapse that led to the self-mutilation of his left ear around half a year prior. Renowned for its intricate brushstrokes and brilliant color scheme, the oil painting depicts a whirling sky through the painter's apartment window, with an imaginary settlement in the foreground.
The researchers' analysis of the finer points of the paintings' colors and brushstrokes, published on Tuesday, September 17, in the journal Physics of Fluids, revealed that these elements have much in common with the "hidden turbulence" of gases in the atmosphere. Scholars examined the 14 "whirls" in the painting's sky in great detail.
Many scientific principles have been brought up that explain how atmospheric gas travels at different sizes based on inertial energy. Overall, these morphologies largely matched patterns predicted by this law. The researchers in the journal wrote that the painting's intensity of yellows represents the inertial energy.
"It reveals a deep and intuitive understanding of natural phenomena. Van Gogh’s precise representation of turbulence might be from studying the movement of clouds and the atmosphere or an innate sense of how to capture the dynamism of the sky," Yongxiang Huang, a fluid dynamics expert and oceanographer at Xiamen University in China said.
A NASA news release referred to the 2004 Hubble telescope photograph of the star V838 Monocerotis' growing light halo as "the universe's version of Van Gogh's painting." Several artists have captured turbulent-looking structures on paper, including Van Gogh. For instance, swirling elements are frequently seen in the paintings of Austrian painter Gustav Klimt, such as The Tree of Life. In his abstract paintings depicting fluid motion.
“I think it is exciting to see how these ideas between art and science are so similar. The way technology has improved over time to connect artists' work and science processes and ideas are just so fascinating,” NHS senior Giovanni Rivera said.
A new species of peacock spider was named after the artwork in 2020 by experts because of the resemblance between the glowing dots on the arachnid's back and the vibrant swirls in van Gogh's painting. Additionally, in 2021, microbiologists discovered a startling parallel between the swarming colonies of mutant bacteria and the painting's recognizable swirls.
New images of Jupiter taken in May of this year by NASA's Juno spacecraft also revealed strong storm swirls in the planet's northern hemisphere that bore striking similarities to recently examined brushstrokes by Vincent van Gogh. These whirling clouds were also connected to Earth-like "turbulent patterns" in Jupiter's atmosphere.
“The art and the scientific concepts behind it are interesting, but it feels like just another case of somebody looking for a deeper meaning in something that might not necessarily be there,” NHS science teacher Christopher Carley said.
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