We’ve all seen this classic piece of artwork, Starry Night, painted by Vincent Van Gogh.
The swirling sky in Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night has invited comparisons with moving water, air and astronomical imagery. Those comparisons can be intriguing without turning a painting into a scientific measurement.
What many don’t know is that Van Gogh painted Starry Night in the insane asylum Saint-Paul-de-Mausole in France.
MoMA dates The Starry Night to June 1889 in Saint-Rémy. The museum describes a work inspired by the view from Van Gogh’s window but also shaped by imagination: the village combined other views, and the placement of the cypress was altered.
Van Gogh Suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy.
The 2016 version connected the painting’s appearance directly to psychosis. The image does not establish that causal claim. A responsible account can acknowledge the artist’s documented difficulties without presenting illness as the explanation for his technique or achievement.
Scientists discovered something amazing about Van Gogh’s paintings ONLY from the psychotic period of his life…..
A visual resemblance is the beginning of a comparison, not its conclusion. A scientific analysis would need to specify the image data, the quantities measured and the limits of the model. Painted brightness is not itself a measurement of the speed of a moving fluid.
After detailed analysis, scientists believe that Van Gogh unknowingly mastered one of the most enigmatic concepts in physical science: fluid turbulence.
Claims that only works made during episodes of illness reproduce turbulence require evidence about both the paintings and their dates. This article does not establish that evidence, and turbulence should not be described as a phenomenon scientists have never been able to characterize. (See the 2024 study below, which examined The Starry Night itself.)
A mathematical similarity between an image and a model would not demonstrate privileged perception caused by psychosis. It would describe a property of the analyzed image under a particular method. The distinction matters because a claim about patterns is much narrower than a claim about a person’s mind.
It is too bad though that Van Gogh died having only sold one piece in his lifetime.
The painting also rewards attention without that speculative story. Short marks create movement across the sky, while the village below offers a quieter arrangement of buildings. The contrast allows the viewer to experience stillness and motion in the same composition. Van Gogh’s achievement does not depend on a retrospective medical explanation or the promise of a newly discovered secret.
Source: Diply via Idealist4ever
What a 2024 physics study found
Physicists have tested the resemblance directly. In a study published in Physics of Fluids in September 2024, a team led by Yongxiang Huang of Xiamen University measured the sizes, spacing and brightness of the 14 main whirls in The Starry Night, using brushstrokes and paint luminance as stand-ins for a flow. The pattern matched Kolmogorov’s description of how energy cascades through turbulent eddies, and at the smallest scales it fitted Batchelor’s scaling for particles carried by turbulence. The same analysis found similar patterns in a Voyager image of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot.
Other physicists urged caution. Princeton’s James Beattie, who was not involved, noted that the painting “has no kinetic energy” and is “actually not turbulence”, calling the match “an amazing coincidence”. Huang suggested Van Gogh absorbed the patterns through long observation of nature. Nothing in the work ties the effect to illness; it describes the painting, not the painter’s mind.
On sales: the only sale of a painting documented in Van Gogh’s lifetime is The Red Vineyard, bought by the Belgian painter Anna Boch for 400 francs at the 1890 Les XX exhibition in Brussels.
Sources: CNN, 19 September 2024: Van Gogh’s The Starry Night shares statistics with real turbulence, study finds The Conversation: Van Gogh Museum at 50 — Vincent van Gogh and the art market
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Additional source: MoMA: The Starry Night, collection record.
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