‘The Starry Night’ Accurately Depicts a Scientific Theory That Wasn’t Described Until Years After van Gogh’s Death

Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night (1889), which features a sky of swirling blue hues streaked with bright gold, is one of the most famous paintings in art history. Now, new research shows that the bold brushstrokes match up with patterns of a scientific theory that wasn’t described until many years later.

The Dutch artist created the masterpiece from a psychiatric facility, which he had checked into after experiencing hallucinations and severing part of his ear. While the work is sometimes interpreted as an expression of his mental health challenges, a new study in the journal Physics of Fluids suggests that it also aligns with Kolmogorov’s theory of turbulence, which describes patterns of fluid dynamics.

Andrey Kolmogorov was a Russian mathematician who identified the way in which energy moves through water or air: Large swirls or “eddies” break into smaller eddies in a predictable way. This type of movement, called turbulent flow, can be seen in “moving water, ocean currents, blood flow, billowing storm clouds and plumes of smoke,” as CNN’s Katie Hunt writes.

“Imagine you are standing on a bridge, and you watch the river flow. You will see swirls on the surface, and these swirls are not random,” co-author Yongxiang Huang, a scholar of fluid dynamics at China’s Xiamen University, tells CNN. “They arrange themselves in specific patterns, and these kinds of patterns can be predicted by physical laws.”

Huang’s team measured the swirls and brushstrokes in The Starry Night and used van Gogh’s color choices to estimate the sky’s movement. They found that 14 of the swirling shapes in the painting align with Kolmogorov’s theory. (Measurements of the small brush strokes also matched up with a concept called Batchelor’s scaling, which describes how energy moves in small-scale turbulence.)

Van Gogh couldn’t have known about Kolmogorov’s theory when he created The Starry Night, as he died 13 years before the mathematician was born. Instead, the researchers think he was able to successfully capture the sky’s turbulence because he was a talented artist and a meticulous observer of nature.

“[The Starry Night] reveals a deep and intuitive understanding of natural phenomena,” says Huang in a statement. “Van Gogh’s precise representation of turbulence might be from studying the movement of clouds and the atmosphere or an innate sense of how to capture the dynamism of the sky.”

Of course, applying physical laws to a 19th-century painting that doesn’t move is challenging. Researchers also don’t know whether van Gogh’s accurate portrayal of turbulence was simply a coincidence.

However, Adam Frank, an ​​astrophysicist at the University of Rochester who was not involved in the study, tells NBC News’ Ellison Barber that art and science both have the ability to capture truths about the world.

“I don’t think this is a coincidence. I think that van Gogh was responding intuitively, emotionally, to what he was seeing in the sky, and was therefore sort of recapturing those patterns that a detailed mathematical analysis would also find,” Frank says. “What he was doing was capturing in the language of painting, what would later be captured in the very beautiful language of mathematics.”

Julia Binswanger | READ MORE

Julia Binswanger is a freelance arts and culture reporter based in Chicago. Her work has been featured in WBEZ, Chicago magazine, Rebellious magazine and PC magazine.