Science and art

Science and art are usually considered a good combination; why?
Maybe it is due to the way in which an artist and a scientist approach their work. Although it doesn't seem so, there are many common points about how both approach a problem or concept. There is something intuitive or even emotional that unites them in their creative or research process.

Your experience must have shown you what it is that unites them.
My work is mainly focused in trying to establish relations between the structure and nature, specifically the mental structures we use to discern how they are expressed in art and science.  It is about the basic intuitions that at least some of the artists and scientists manifest when they go beyond the superficial appearance of an object or idea and about how intuition allows them to understand a form or causes an emotion in them. 

So what unites them is intuition.
It is a kind of intuition, something that in an object is perceived as especially interesting that captures the artist's attention. Many scientists start their work in the same way. 

But science and art are not the same.
Obviously not; and it is clear that it is about essentially different works. But there is this underlying nexus which gives sense to how we interpret the world. This is what interests me. And that is what explains how we deal with a scientific problem in the most sophisticated way possible and how we pass a structure to the scientific territory.

One could use it as an educational method that would override knowledge
Photo: Carmen Secanella

Therefore, scientists and artists are put to work starting at the same point.
It is no universal theory, and a theoretical physicist doesn't evolve in the same way as an expert in environment or somebody who analyzes the behaviour of a fluid, for example. But there are cases in which one can talk about a certain type of 'visual science' that shares the same substrate.

This substrate is the one that explains your research on Leonardo Da Vinci's work?
It is a privilege to be able to work with a figure that awakens such public interest. Leonardo provokes a generalized feeling of admiration in anyone who approaches his work and thought. It is the same feeling I had when I started my research. And of course most of us know that Leonardo bequeathed us a work in which he was highlighted as an engineer, architect, physicist, anatomist… During his entire life he contributed so much in so many fields. 

What have you learned from him?
Despite his enormous work diversity I think there is something that unites his scientific and artistic contributions. There is something similar to a pattern; a consistent scheme that explains how he interprets the structure and transforms it in work or thought.

How is that structure?
We could describe it as a basic trunk, not especially complex, that can multiply, combine or modify itself. It is somehow similar to complexity science; that is starting from an expression one can reach several and different considerations. Put in a different way: the mental structure with which Leonardo works is similar to a tree, with a basic trunk from which several branches emerge; this modus operandi is the one that connects the Mona Lisa with the flying machine designed by Leonardo. Both recreate nature. 

Could we conclude that nature is Leonardo's trunk?
Nature is the trunk, correct, but understood as Natural Law and not as an eclectic approach to a collection of objects or natural observations.

That would be equivalent to saying that having a good trunk, a solid base, is essentials for gaining diversity…
The main lecture would be that by having this trunk, one can then move on to the approach to apparently different problems in a solid way. In the case of Leonardo, it would be like saying he had something like a 'lateral thinking', which means some way of moving from a knowledge field to another although maintaining some element that unites them all.

STORY OF A PORTRAIT Martin Kemp has reached international notoriety for his contributions to the knowledge of the artistic and scientific legacy of Leonardo Da Vinci. This notoriety has been recently strengthened by its expertise on an old parchment originally attributed to a German author of the nineteenth Century. After submitting the original to all kinds of analysis, from the purely technical and scientific to the historical interpretations, Kemp concluded that it was actually Leonardo's work. The finding of 'unmistakable' prints gave him away; also the style, the type of materials and other technical details too.

"I'm 100% sure, it is like a jigsaw where finally all pieces match together, there are neither inconsistencies nor doubts ", Kemp assures. No trace of a possible of an ordered counterfeiting or duplication. "Everything fits ", he insists. Today the parchment is valued in 147 million dollars. Before the experts survey, it was only worth about 12,000 at any auction house.