He really traveled the extra mile.
Recently, atmospheric scientists discovered that “The Starry Night,” the hallmark artwork created in 1889 by Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh, is remarkably consistent with astronomical theories of our sky. This also indicates that the artist was far ahead of the scientific minds of the 19th century.
Scientists believe Van Gogh's bold brush strokes were created to account for spots of invisible uneven air flow, known as turbulence, which causes changes in views of the night sky.
What’s even more amazing is that he created this vibrant portrait in broad daylight, in a windowless studio. According to Artnet,
Now, The researchers reported in a report published in Physics of Fluids that, He has identified a “hidden unrest” within Van Gogh's exuberant style.
The artist appears to have compensated for principles of fluid dynamics that were only discovered about 100 years later — such as a scale for the motion of air energy designed by mathematician George Batchelor in 1959.
“The scale of the paint strokes played an important role,” said author Yongjiang Huang.
“With high-resolution digital images, we were able to precisely measure the characteristic sizes of brushstrokes and compare these to the scales expected from turbulence theories.”
Further than that, A 2019 study suggested He took into account not only the turbulence within the atmosphere, but also the turbulence of stars located light years away.
The authors of the current study examined different types of brushstrokes under similar conditions such as leaves swaying in the wind to classify the atmospheric conditions of the wind such as its size and energy. Other factors regarding brightness within different paint colors were also examined in relation to the energy of motion.
What he learned most through the experiments — including the 14 swirling shapes of “Starry Night” — was how Van Gogh had a unique relationship with the movement of our natural land and sky.
“This reveals a deep and intuitive understanding of natural phenomena,” Huang said.
“Van Gogh's accurate depiction of turbulence may have come from his study of the movement of clouds and the atmosphere or from his intuitive ability to capture the dynamics of the sky.”
The spatial functions and the intentional flashes were found to correspond to actual movements in the atmosphere within the scale of momentum-driven energy – known scientifically as Kolmogorov's laws of the 1940s.
Particularly from an academic perspective, “Starry Night” is notable for the subtlety of the glow spread across the painting, as well as the turbulence from the atmosphere above.
Now, the team is rethinking what we know about air currents and related “phenomena” by looking at Van Gogh's masterpiece.
“It seems like it is time to propose a new definition of turbulence to include more situations,” Huang said.
