This Painting Was Cutting-Edge Science. Here's Why

But what if I told you, there was once a man who didn't just draw perfect circles, he could draw the movement of the light that formed them. You'll probably already be familiar with this picture, just like you'll recognise the name of the man who painted it, Vincent van Gogh. Or is that... Go... Goch? Goo? Hang on. Goff! There we go. He is, after all, one of the most famous artists in the history of the world. As Bill Nighy's character in Doctor Who points out, To me, van Gogh is the finest painter in the world. Certainly the most popular great painter of all time. Now as I'm sure we can all attest, Doctor Who has an immaculate record of historical accuracy and may never be questioned by anyone. Ever. All joking aside though, Starry Night is a beautiful piece of art. I mean, it's so famous as to be almost synonymous with the word art, it's right up there with things like the Mona Lisa, the Sistine Chapel and The Scream as an image that just jumps into your head when you talk about the medium of painting. There's something about it that just leaps off the page, and it's more than van Gogh's inventive use of thick paint to lift the art and give it texture. Looking at the canvas, it almost feels as though the picture is moving, even though your brain is telling you that it's standing still. That feeling isn't you going crazy, it's intentional. The thick paint is actually part of a technique used by impressionist painters like van Gogh to trick your mind into seeing what isn't there, or rather what's really there, behind the lie your brain is telling you. Excuse me whilst I borrow Dr. Albert Einstein to explain this for us. Doctor? Thank you. It's really rather simple, you see, the visual cortex of the brain is a primitive construction. It's evolved to register the basic things to keep it alive in the wild. So, it registers luminescence and movement, but not the colour. It is important to register the movement of the tiger coming towards you, ones that you would be able to see to run away from it. Less important is the lovely shade of orange the tiger's fur is contrasting with the beautiful greens of the forest around it. Thus, the visual cortex will see items of similar luminescence as the same colour, even if they are not. There are other parts of the brain, however, that will see the difference in colour simultaneously, overlaying this image on top of the more simplistic picture created by the visual cortex to create a big ball full of the wibbly wobbly coloury volley stuff. An elegant description, thank you doctor. Now, if you apply this knowledge to the painting, we can see some of the genius of van Gogh at work. The way he's created his swirling circles, tracing the thick lines of contrasting colour against each other, creates the illusion of movement on the page. It's like he's broken down what's happening in your brain when you watch a moonlit landscape and then artificially recreated it on the canvas. And he's done it more than a hundred years before we had the science to describe the process. Unfortunately, van Gogh wasn't as skilled at describing complex science and mathematical equations as he was with a paintbrush. After all, if somebody came up to you and started a conversation like this... The stars are made of two kinds of light that you can see and not see at the same time. I can see the colours of it out of my window at night and I decided to paint it, but I thought it would look better with a village underneath it. It's okay, I kept it black so it wouldn't distract you from the spirals of the stardust and the way the stars all look like sunflowers. But you know, everything looks like sunflowers to me because I love sunflowers. You might be forgiven for being slightly taken aback, and whilst that description may sound mildly amusing, the reality of van Gogh's condition when he painted Starry Night was not. The view in this painting is the view from his window at the mental hospital of Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. Van Gogh added the village in the lower right hand corner of the painting himself. He spent a year in that institution after his deteriorating mental health had caused him to remove his own ear with a straight razor. Van Gogh's depression is infamous. One of his most famous paintings is actually of the doctor his family hired to try and help him. The thing is, his dedication to art never wavered, even whilst institutionalised. During his stay at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, he created more than 150 separate works of art. Today, those are some of the most sought after pieces in the world, Starry Night amongst them. At the time they were created, they were regarded as the worthless scribblings of a madman. The thing is, it wasn't just madness. There was something really happening in his art. As his health worsened, Van Gogh began to include more motion in his paintings. His style started to change in ways you'd hardly notice if you weren't looking for it. All of it showing more and more a simple, yet devastatingly important fact. Van Gogh saw the world differently. To see the method in his madness, I shall have to ask you to follow me on a journey into maths. Bet you didn't think you'd be seeing that in an art video. Don't worry, it's not long division. It's simply the ratio of a regular pentagon's diagonal to its own side. Use that ratio to create the sides of a rectangle, then cut it in half and you'll create a square. Cut it in half again, and a smaller rectangle. This will be the same ratio of width to length, just a quarter the size. That can be done indefinitely. If you then drew a spiral around those shapes, getting smaller at the same rate, it might look something like this. Look familiar? You'll have seen it before. Here. And here. Oh yes, that last one isn't just a coincidence. Because it's not just some flowers where Van Gogh uses that ratio. Have another look at the original picture. It's in every single spiral you can see on that page. Each one of those swirling pools of light is a spiral created with the use of the golden ratio, a mathematical curiosity that has been remarked upon since the time of ancient Greek mathematicians and philosophers like Pythagoras and Euclid. That shape keeps showing up throughout nature, and it's a massive part of how we calculate turbulence in water. If you look at that picture, but imagine that instead of seeing clouds, you're seeing the swirling eddies of a stream or river, the patterns will again seem oddly familiar. That shape, and its part in how we calculate and predict the movement of energy through water and light through stardust, is one of the most complicated mathematical physics problems known to man. A large proportion of the recent research was carried out by studying the movement of gases in Jupiter's red spot. Utilising the Hubble telescope, scientists gazed out into the stars and created maps of that motion in the gravity of the planets. When they looked at their pictures, starry night was what was staring back at them. The same shapes, the same designs, but Van Gogh? He did it without electronics, computers or space telescopes. He put it into the painting you can see right in front of you. He created a map of one of the true mysteries of the universe using nothing but the naked eye, a brush and some canvas. Which must have really sucked for the scientists when you think about it. I mean, imagine making that kind of a discovery, and your boss responds like this. Sir, sir, it's marvellous, we've made a breakthrough, we finally have a working model for turbulence. That's amazing, Jefferies. Let me see. I know, sir. I've been working since I was 18 to get this theory together. It's been my dream. When the other guys were out drinking and cavorting, this was my life. When they were falling in love and travelling the world on their gap years, this was my life. When they were getting married and having children, did I care? Did I waver for a second? No, sir. This discovery is my life's work. And it's finally finished. Yes. I've seen this before. What? Yeah, some crazy Dutch bloke drew it about a hundred years ago in a mental hospital in France. I've got a copy hanging on my office wall. Although I have to be honest, his does look a little better. More inventive use of colour. Jefferies? I say, he's jumped out the window. Good thing we put those hawthorn bushes down there. No! Poor guy. Still, being van Gogh was no bed of roses. If Starry Night is anything to go by, his life must have been close to torture. I mean, imagine seeing that, the shape of starlight every single day, and never being able to tell anyone. one. Every attempt you made met with derision and dismissal. It'd be a knife to drive anyone to despair. But rather than let it beat him, Van Gogh channelled it into art that would change the world forever, into fields of golden corn, sunflowers and starry nights, all because Van Gogh simply saw the world differently. Thanks for watching, guys. If you've got any art you'd like us to review, or perhaps you've noticed the golden ratio present in other famous pieces, let us know in the comments below. And don't forget to like, subscribe and hit the little bell icon if you'd like to hear more from us about art in the future. For now, it's been great to share with you, and I'll see you in the next video.