Using Art to Advance Science

The NY Times ran an interesting post on the analysis of paintings in order to reveal atmospheric changes.  Usually science impacts art in authentication, but here the reverse is the case where paintings done between the years 1500 and 2000 were analyzed for red to green rations along the horizons.

The NY Times reports

Sunsets painted by the great masters are now providing a type of information their creators could never have imagined: important clues about air pollution.

Polluted skies result in redder sunsets, and artists captured this redness on the canvas, said Andreas Kazantzidis, an atmospheric physicist at the University of Patras in Greece who was involved in the research.

He and his colleagues analyzed hundreds of high-quality digital photographs of paintings done between 1500 and 2000. The period included more than 50 large volcanic eruptions around the globe.

In each painting, they looked at the red-to-green ratio along the horizon of each sunset to estimate the amount of aerosols in the atmosphere at the time.

When the Tambora volcano in Indonesia erupted in 1815, ash and gas spewed into the atmosphere, producing bright red and orange sunsets in Europe for several years. This is evident in the paintings of the British master J. M. W. Turner.

“From Turner you see that in this specific year he starts painting sunsets a little more reddish, compared to two or three years before,” Dr. Kazantzidis said.

Using art to advance science is an emerging interdisciplinary field, he said. The first meteorological measurements were not made until the 1850s, so paintings could be an important source of information.

“For curators, climate scientists and atmospheric physicists, I think, it’s a huge new field for research,” he said.

Source: The NY Times