Swirling Skies In Van Gogh’s ‘The Starry Night’ Accurately Depict Turbulence: Researchers

One of the most recognizable paintings of all time, The Starry Night, has been found to exhibit how mathematics governs turbulent flow. Researchers in China and France say the whirls and swirls in Vincent van Gogh’s iconic work signal an intuitive understanding of how air, water, and other fluids experience seemingly chaotic fluctuations. Their study settles a decades-long debate over whether the painting adheres to Soviet mathematician Andrey Kolmogorov’s theory of turbulence.

The Starry Night is an oil-on-canvas painting that depicts the artist’s view at dawn from an east-facing window in southern France. Van Gogh is said to have voluntarily checked in to a mental health facility in the village of Saint-Rémy-de-Provence after famously suffering a crisis in which he cut off his earlobe. During his year-long stay, van Gogh produced more than 150 paintings and drawings, including, the village’s tourism department says, The Starry Night, The Almond Tree Branch in Bloom, and The Iris. This context has long led scholars to assume that the fluid-like patterns in The Starry Night reflect the artist’s challenging mental state at the time of its creation.

According to a paper published Tuesday in the journal Physics of Fluids, van Gogh’s mental state wasn’t the only factor that influenced his most beloved work. “van Gogh had a very careful observation of real flows, so that not only the sizes of whirls/eddies in The Starry Night but also their relative distances and intensity follow the physical law that governs turbulent flows,” write researchers at Xiamen University, Shenzhen’s Southern University of Science and Technology, and northern France’s Université du Littoral Côte d’Opale. 

Although previous research into the mathematical principles involved in van Gogh’s work has focused on just a few swirls and eddies from The Starry Night, the researchers note that they studied “all and only” the painting’s whirls in their work. Using a high-resolution photograph of The Starry Night, they examined the whirls’ brushstrokes for spatial variation and even paint luminance—variables that would reveal whether van Gogh’s work mimicked the ways in which actual air experiences turbulence. They found that the brushstrokes satisfied Kolmorogov’s theory, which explains how energy flows from large eddies to smaller ones before dispersing.

“Imagine you are standing on a bridge, and you watch the river flow,” Yongxiang Huang, the study’s lead author, told CNN. “You will see swirls on the surface, and these swirls are not random. They arrange themselves in specific patterns, and these kinds of patterns can be predicted by physical laws.”

It’s highly unlikely that van Gogh consciously considered Kolmogorov’s theory of turbulence as he danced his paintbrush over what would become The Starry Night. But the researchers believe van Gogh spent enough time observing nature that he began to intuitively understand how turbulence operates in the real world, even if he never consciously acknowledged it. From rivers and streams to hurricanes and volcanic plumes, turbulent flow exists just about everywhere; it’s that very ubiquity that might have helped The Starry Night resonate with so many viewers for more than 100 years./extremetech.com