When I was reading Professor Conway’s article of doing science and making art, I was reminded of Leonardo Da Vinci. There was recently an article in The Guardian arguing whether Da Vinci was a great artist or a great scientist. What I found extremely interesting was that the autor proposed that Da Vinci was “neither, both”. I believe that Da Vinci encapsulates that seemingly great divide between artists and scientists, a divide that Professor Conway attempts to reduce through his deduction that art has a specific cognitive process. Conway suggests that Picasso’s portraits were able to capture the essence of their subjects because of a lifetime of cognitive observations and that artists like Cezanne were extremely scientific in their choice of color and would rather leave blank spots than just randomly allocate a color. Similarly, one of Da Vinci’s most famous paintings, ‘The Vitruvian’ man perfectly captures the proportions of a human being as it is based on specific, accurate observations. Thus Da Vinci was actually at his most scientific when he was being an artist. This was when he used the actual science process of making observations and telling a story. In fact, his observations were so accurate that recently a doctor in Cambridge redesigned an aspect of heart surgery after studying Da Vinci’s depictions of a dissected heart
(Link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4289204.stm.)
Thus, it is extremely interesting to see how interlinked science is with art. While I had always known that there was a science to color choices, and as Jocelyn’s presentation depicted, there is such a big scienific component to the conservation of paintings, I had never even considered Professor Conaway’s proposal that the very essence of art is scientific; that with artists like Cezanne and Picasso, no stroke is random, no portrait is drawn without hours of careful observations; that with artists like Da Vinci, even the portrayal of scientific depictions can be artistic to capture the true essence of the object.