Have you ever wondered what happens when a spider gets hold of some marijuana? No, nor had I until I saw a photograph of the web that one spaced-out spider tried to spin. The result looks like the handiwork of a poorly co-ordinated novice knitter.
And what about cerebral cortex nerve cells? I hadn’t really thought much about them either, but then I saw a photograph of them and noticed how much they look like a painting by Jackson Pollock. They’d look splendid on a white gallery wall.
So would the infrared satellite image of the Gobi desert, which, if you narrow your eyes slightly, has the look of one of Turner’s skies. Or the highly coloured thermograms of people kissing, or the scanning electron micrograph close-ups of the tongues of weird bugs. These look oddly like Corinthian capitals.
All these images are to be found in the Science Photo Library, the world’s leading provider of scientific photographs. The SPL holds 250,000 pictures created with scientific techniques as diverse as immunofluorescence light microscopy, electron micrographs, thermograms and satellite imaging. It was founded 25 years ago by Michael Marten after he and three colleagues published Worlds Within Worlds, the first popular book to show the new range of scientific imagery developed since the 1950s. The images were originally conceived purely as contributions to scientific knowledge, but over the years their use has extended into the worlds of art and culture.
“Scientific images just weren’t part of most people’s visual vocabulary when SPL started. Nowadays they are used in ads, on newspaper front pages, in pop videos, almost anywhere,” says Marten. Chemical Brothers have used an SPL image for an album cover. Damien Hirst made use of them in an exhibition in New York in 2005. “The images act as inspiration for creators of all sorts, from graphic designers to contemporary artists, generating new and original art works,” says SPL’s sales and marketing director, Maria Storey. “SPL truly bridges the arts/science divide.”
In the history of art, however, science and the arts have always been closely linked. For hundreds of years artists have used scientific investigation as part of the process of creating art, and scientists, equally, have recorded their findings in documents that have come to be seen as art.
Leonardo da Vinci is probably the most widely known example of the artist who founded his work on rigorous scientific experimentation and observation. At a time when learned men at the universities relied on the authority of the admired ancient writers, Leonardo, the artist, would trust nothing but his own eyes. There was nothing in nature that did not arouse his curiosity and challenge his ingenuity.
He explored the secrets of the human body by dissecting more than 30 corpses. He was one of the first to probe the mysteries of the growth of the child in the womb. He investigated the laws of currents and waves, and spent years observing and analysing the flight of insects and birds. He engineered fortifications and canals, devised novel weapons, created mechanical toys and designed new effects for stage performances. But he never considered himself a scientist. All his work was a means of gaining knowledge of the visible world for his art.
Leonardo’s genius was well known by his contemporaries and the later artists of the Renaissance because his admirers and pupils carefully preserved thousands of pages of his sketches and notebooks containing detailed anatomical studies and other astonishing discoveries. By this time, all serious artists were expected to have a good knowledge of anatomy. Michelangelo practised human dissection to improve his renderings of the human body.
Two hundred years later Stubbs became famous for his detailed depictions of horses that were the result of hours of scientific study. To assist him in his work, he dissected horses and drew hundreds of anatomical studies from every conceivable angle.
In 1766 he published an independent treatise, Anatomy of the Horse, in which horses are portrayed with layer after layer of flesh and muscle removed, culminating in the perfectly drafted skeleton. The book retains its scientific value today.
A knowledge of geometry was an important requirement of the artist as far back as the Renaissance. Piero della Francesca, for example, wrote a treatise on mathematics. Two hundred years after him, it is possible that Vermeer and other artists began using optical devices such as the camera obscura, for which a level of scientific knowledge was essential. David Hockney wrote a controversial book on this subject, arguing that they did, although his theory has not found much favour.
Of course there are plenty of artists from before the age of photography who directly served scientific needs by recording natural phenomena, and in doing so created art. Redoute made exquisite botanical studies as a scientific pursuit that have since come to be seen as art. In creating his Birds of America in the 1830s, James John Audobon produced both a beautiful work of art and an important scientific document. Pietro Fabris, working for the great vulcanologist Sir William Hamilton, made dozens of hand-coloured etchings of Vesuvius, which were published in Hamilton’s Campi Phlegraei of 1776. Today they are viewed as both artworks and scientific records.
In the 20th century the study of colour theory and optics was undoubtedly influential in the birth of abstraction. Both Seurat and Kandinsky, for example, were well versed in these subjects. Juan Gris devised the arrangement of forms in his abstract works according to mathematical principles. And we know that Jackson Pollock read d’Arcy Thompson’s classic 1917 book on structure in nature, On Growth and Form.
Sigmar Polke has made a series of works influenced by alchemy. Kazimir Malevich recently said that his paintings evoked the fourth dimension described in Einstein’s theory of relativity and Charles Jencks has devised his garden in Dumfriesshire according to fractal patterns derived from chaos theory.
The best-known contemporary artist plunderer of science is probably Damien Hirst. His fascination with the periodic table has inspired many of his works, and he recently converted an anatomical model into a 40ft (12m) bronze sculpture, entitled Virgin Mother, located outside the Royal Society of Chemistry in London. It depicts a pregnant girl, who, seen from one side, reveals thigh, breast tissue, eye socket and skull in the manner of a drawing by Leonardo.
Science can evidently also be art and vice versa. The Science Photo Library has contributed to a radically altered image of the world around us, and also of our own interior world. We can now see geology and geography instead of depending on maps. Abstract diagrams and statistics can be turned into swirling weather systems, sharp corrugations of the planet’s crust or glowing networks of vegetation.
With micrographic techniques we can observe the microworld that exists inside us, and see how organisms develop hierarchies, mark their territories and repel invaders, how they go about cleaning our lungs, filtering our blood and fighting our diseases.
What the images held by SPL make clear is that throughout the spectrum of existence, in the systems that govern the Earth and those that control our bodies, the same fundamental patterns are repeated. The spiral shape of a diminutive marine organism, for example, reappears in the clouds of a cyclone and the structure of a galaxy. The branching pattern that distributes blood to our lungs is repeated in trees and rivers.
This knowledge is not new, but SPL has enabled many more people to be able to see it and make use of it. And not only scientists, but artists too.
Science Photo Library, 327-329 Harrow Road, London W9 3RB (020-7342 1100; www.sciencephoto.com)
