Our songs of love to those who bridged the arts and the sciences #5 - From astronomy to art to music: Stars, starry night, and more stars

As we enter the season for stargazing, when the skies are wintry, cold and clear, we look forward to those cloudless nights that reveal a bright canopy of stars. 

As we get closer to Christmas, it is also the time when astronomy is celebrated: the magi, three wise men from Persia, followed a star to Bethlehem. What star was it?  A comet?  A meteor?  We have no idea..

What is interesting is that the star of Bethlehem rarely appears in Renaissance paintings and does not seem to have interested 15th-century artists like Gozzoli, Botticelli or the like. Even the infinitely curious Leonardo da Vinci, who was so in love with science, does not appear to include a star in his enigmatic Adoration of the Magi.  Raphael, for his part, painted the moon and the sun with human faces. 

Having said that, stars do appear in paintings, as we find silver stars in Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne, about a woman who was changed into a constellation.  For Titian and Tintoretto, stars are magical crosses of light.

It wasn’t until the start of the 17th century, when Galileo turned a telescope on the moon and other objects in the night sky, showing that what we see in the sky at night are physical and not heavenly phenomena, that artists started depicting the star the magi followed and even speculated as to what it was.  Murillo showed it as a comet, as did Velázquez.  From utter mystery, the sky became a place with physical laws.

In the same era, Italian baroque painter Guercino depicted Endymion asleep with a telescope on his lap.  The sky was no longer a place of signs and wonders but a a new frontier for science to explore.

And then we have van Gogh and his “Starry Night” paintings (various versions at New York's MOMA as well as in Paris' Musee d'Orsay): “… the sight of the stars always makes me dream,” van Gogh once wrote. “Why, I say to myself, should the spots of light in the firmament be less accessible to us than the black spots on the map of France? Just as we take the train to go to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to go to a star.”

The Starry Night is based on van Gogh’s direct observations as well as his imagination, memories, and emotions.  The whirling forms in the sky, on the other hand, matched published astronomical observations of clouds of dust and gas known as nebulae.  The cypress can be seen symbolically as a bridge between life, as represented by the earth, and death, as represented by the sky, commonly associated with heaven.  At once balanced and expressive, the composition is structured by his ordered placement of the cypress, steeple, and central nebulae, while his countless short brushstrokes and thickly applied paint set its surface in roiling motion. 

It has been said that the inspiration behind the distinctive swirls in the sky of Van Gogh's "Starry Night" is an 1845 drawing by astronomer William Parsons, of the Whirlpool Galaxy.  There is research done confirming that the dominant morning star in the painting is actually Venus, which was in a similar position at the time Van Gogh was working on "Starry Night," and it would have shone brightly, just as the artist painted it.

In music, the figure who was a stargazer par excellence is the French composer, Camille Saint-Saens, yes, the guy who wrote “The Swan”.  

A music prodigy, he gave his first concert at the age of eleven, entered the Conservatoire at thirteen, and at eighteen was employed as a church organist; but a childhood visit to the Paris Observatory and a telescopic glimpse of the Moon seem to have fired his imagination. 

In fact, at the age of 23, he sold six of his compositions that were duets for piano and harmonium, in order to buy an 8cm Secretan with which he was able to follow Donati’s Comet (just discovered) and to study double stars and stellar colours.  He also studied astronomical and atmospheric phenomena while on his travels: at Luxor he observed the zodiac to be “even brighter than the Milky Way”; in the Canaries and in Ceylon he studied some of the southern constellations, and he mentions an occasion in Paris, when a second Eiffel Tower appeared in the sky, inverted and as if suspended immediately above.  He later became a member of the Astronomical Society of France. 

 

 


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