Science as an inspiration
No art exists in a vacuum — it’s always influenced by politics, society, trends, wars, private life of its creators and what not. And sometimes it’s inspired by science.
Space
In November 1609 Galileo saw the moon in his new improved telescope for the first time. What he saw surprised him: the moon, the great heavenly object, was not an ideal, perfectly smooth sphere. Instead, it appeared to have a dark side and was covered with valleys and mountains, just like the Earth. This discovery made his friend Cigoli to draw a more realistic version of the moon in his fresco for the Pauline Chapel. Adding these visible imperfections to the fresco was a real statement since the moon was widely used as a symbol of the Virgin Mary, one of the most sacred characters in Christianity.
Cigoli wasn’t the last one who thought that the moon deserves a proper artistic representation. 400 years later Luke Jerram followed his steps: he took the most up-to-date NASA moon captures and created a scientific-reliable model in scale 1:500000 which is now travelling around the world appearing in the most unexpected locations.
Polyhedrons
One of the most famous and seriously taken polyhedrons in the art history is so-called Dürer’s solid, featured on the engraving called “Melencolia I”. Dürer personally loved this artwork and made quite enough prints of it but he never bothered to provide any explanations. As a result, there exist hundreds of possible interpretations, from blog posts to serious research papers. Was it a hint to a solution of the “Delian problem”? This problem was known since ancient Greece and was proved to be insoluble in the 19th century, however, we know for a fact that Dürer was an author of a really good approximate solution to it. Or maybe it’s somehow connected to the magic square in the same painting? Nowadays we’re used to magic squares but this one was one of the first in Northern Europe. Or is it just a random truncated triangular trapezohedron? But in this case why put it in the picture at all?
Another famous but less debatable polyhedron is depicted in “Corpus Hypercubus” by Salvador Dali. In this painting, Dali placed Christ upon the unfolded net of a hypercube. As a surrealist Dali wasn’t expected to provide any reasoning to back up this creative decision (for what it’s worth he called it “metaphysical transcendent cubism”) but there is a really beautiful theory about it. Just as with God, we can describe the hypercube but are incapable of imagining it. And just as the net is a representation of the hypercube in a familiar to us 3D space, Christ was a representation of God in the human space, the one we could wrap our minds around.
Light and color
Both the divisionism and pointillism art styles were born thanks to the development of the color theory. The idea was to replace the physical pigment mixing with placing multicolored contrasting dots close to each other so they could interact optically. In some sense, they drew pixels. Of course, the additive luminosity (which was the main goal) could be achieved only by operating with colored light, not pigments, but the result was fascinating nonetheless.
Probably the weirdest artistic interpretation of the light and color perception belonged to Mikhail Larionov. He invented Rayonism — an art style based on the belief that since in reality people see not the objects themselves but the sum of rays reflected from them, drawing the rays is the truest way of depicting the world.
Non-Euclidian geometries
In 1902 Poincaré published his “Science and Hypothesis” — a real best-seller aiming to explain modern scientific concepts to non-scientists. In 1904 another French mathematician Maurice Princet (who was so close to the artistic circles that eventually his wife left him for André Derain), started a series of informal lectures based on this book, especially on the concepts of non-Euclidian geometries and the idea of 4th dimension. And in 1909 under the direct influence of these ideas cubism was born. The artists got officially free of the idea that the classic perspective is the only right one. Comparing to many other art styles, cubism isn’t particularly colorful and it makes sense: the main goal was to show the innovative space transformations, so adding extra color would inevitably distract the viewers from it.
Particle Physics
You might think that the modern science looks down on the artists but that’s not the case. For example, CERN offers one to three months residence for artists willing to create in close connection with the particle physics research. Below is one of the products of such collaboration: the artist duo Semiconductor took the raw data generated from the ATLAS experiment and transformed it into sound and light signals while adding a significant slowdown since originally in ATLAS experiment things happen with the speed of light. As a result, they got an interactive installation where people could literally get inside the data, feel how massive it is and try to find any patterns. High-tech poetry, if you ask me.
