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da Vinci and Friends: Curriculum Where Science and the Arts Meet People - Historical “Where the world ceases to be the scene of our personal hopes and wishes, where we face it as free beings admiring, asking, and observing, there we enter the realm of Art and Science. ” - Albert Einstein Leonardo Da Vinci (1452-1519): Artist, Scientist and Inventor Alexander Borodin (1833-1837): Chemist-Composer Hildegard (1099 - 1179): Music Composer and Science Writer Samuel Morse (1791-1872): Artist and Inventor Helen Beatrix Potter (1866 - 1943): Writer, Illustrator and Scientist John James Audubon (1785-1851): Painter and Ornithologist Alexander Calder (1898-1976): Engineer-turned-Sculptor Albertus Seba (1665 - 1736): Natural History Collector Frederic E. Church (1826-1900): A Beautiful Hand Mary Ellen Bute (1906-1983): Science and Art in Film Santiago Ramon y Cajal (1852-1934): Frustrated Artist is Nobel Prize Winner Georg von Békésy (1899-1972): Chemist Borodin and Elgar - Chemistry and Composing List of Musician-Scientists Arnold Fanck (1889 - 1974): Geologist - Filmmaker William Carlos Williams (1883 - 1963): Doctor and Poet George Washington Carver, Jr. (1865 - 1943): Agriculturalist Fillipo Brunelleschi (1377 -1446), Renaissance Engineer John Constable (1776-1837): Cloudy Day Painter Leonardo Da Vinci (1452-1519): Artist, Scientist and Inventor Leonardo is perhaps our most well-known example of a person who was an artist, scientist and inventor. It has been said that he stated life more as an artist and ended it more as a scientist. We know him for the painting Mona Lisa, for anatomical drawing, for planning a helicopter design, for scientific theories and precise observation. http://www.mos.org/sln/Leonardo/ Leonardo da Vinci was also featured in the PBS show about the Medici family, because these powerful patrons also supported him. The Web site summarizes his accomplishments as both artist and scientist. http://www.pbs.org/empires/medici/renaissance/leonardo.html Top Alexander Borodin (1833-1837): Chemist-Composer Alexander Borodin was a Russian chemist and composer. After studying medicine and chemistry, he became chair of the chemistry Department at the Medico-surgical Academy in St. Petersburg. He helped with the founding of a medical school for women. Borodin's musical career was already beginning when he composed a flute concerto at the age of 13. Later in life he continued with music composition, writing symphonies, opera and songs. http://www.lessontutor.com/bf_borodin.html Top Hildegard (1099 - 1179): Music Composer and Science Writer She was the abbess of St. Rupert at Bingen-am-Rhine. She may have been the most prolific writer of the middle ages; one book was "Medicine". She wrote music, transforming the plain chant into the Gregorian chant. Her compositions are available on CDs. Her writing about gravity was correct even centuries before Newton. http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/med/hildegarde.html Top Samuel Morse (1791-1872): Artist and Inventor Samuel Morse is best known for inventing the telegraph, but was both an artist and inventor. He was educated at Yale and in London, and became a successful portrait painter and sculptor. He was the first President of the National Academy of Design in New York, after having been a founding member. When a professor of sculpture and painting at New York University, he became interested in chemistry and electricity. His experiments led to the invention of the telegraph. http://web.mit.edu/invent/iow/morse.html Top Helen Beatrix Potter (1866 - 1943): Writer, Illustrator and Scientist Known most for her children's books and the tales of Peter Rabbit, Potter was not only a writer and artist but also a mycologist. She was widely respected throughout England as an expert on fungi, though she met with sex discrimination in the Royal Botanical Gardens. http://www.engr.psu.edu/wep/EngCompSp98/ABrown/beatrixpotter2.html Top John James Audubon (1785-1851): Painter and Ornithologist Audubon was a naturalist, artist and ornithologist, most known for his realistic portrayal of American birds in his hand-colored prints in the book "The Birds of America" . The National Audubon Society is named in his honor. Audubon once described his paintings of birds, "as if art dictating to nature." He painted birds in their habitats and invented a technique of wiring dead birds before painting them so that he could capture them as they appear live in the wild. Joseph Kastner ("A Species of Eternity," EP Dutton), wrote that Audubon undertook one of the earliest experiments in bird banding. "I attached light threads to the legs of the young but these they or their parents invariably removed. When they were about to leave I fixed a light silver thread to the leg of each, so fastened that the bird could not remove it." The threads were still on some of the birds (phoebes) when they returned the following spring." He once cut a hole in a hollow sycamore tree where chimney swifts roosted so that he could get inside and count the birds at night. This resulted in the following calculation. "There would be 375 square feet of surface. Each square foot would contain 32 birds. The number of swallows therefore that roosted in this single tree was 9,000." (Adapted from an article by Ed Hessler in MN Science Teachers Ass'n. listserv) http://www.audubon.org/nas/jja.html Top Alexander Calder (1898-1976): Engineer-turned-Sculptor A mechanical engineer by training, Alexander Calder is known as a sculptor who experimented with motion and with abstraction in his art, bringing him a reputation as one of the most innovative and witty artists of his time. He is most known for his mobiles and stabiles, which combined his engineering expertise with his creative genius. http://www.calder.org/ Top Albertus Seba (1665 - 1736): Natural History Collector Scientists Commissioned Artists Centuries Ago. At least thirteen artists were employed to illustrate a lavish compendium of animal and plant specimens from the East and West Indies by Albertus Seba, an early eighteenth-century apothecary and natural history collector from Amsterdam. An article in the March 2002 issue of NATURAL HISTORY describes how three centuries ago was "a transition period in the history of science, in which superficial observation of nature was being increasingly replaced by close examination of the diversity of biological forms." In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, collections were described, compared and ordered, in the effort to get a scientific understanding of nature. In fact, Seba's "Thesaurus" was was cited 284 times by Linnaeus in his "Systema Naturae," the basis for modern classification. 0More on Seba: http://www.strangescience.net/seba.htm Images: http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&lr=&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=Seba%2C+albertus Top Frederic E. Church (1826-1900): A Beautiful Hand Most people will sense right away if an artist has portrayed a human body with poor proportions or inaccurate lines, but few of us will notice or care if there is a similar inaccuracy in a painting or sketch of a plant. A great landscape artist will be a keen observer of the patterns and peculiarities of plant growth, as described in an article by Rob Nicholson in "Natural History" (June 2002). A Hudson River School artist, Frederic E. Church, met what may have been his greatest challenge in the tropics, and he used his training in both science and art theory. In the nineteenth century scientists were busy cataloguing the species of plants and animals found in nature, and artists complemented the work of scientists in this endeavor. Church was a leader among New England landscape painters when he broadened his territory to South America, traveling from the Caribbean to the Andes and Pacific coast forests. It appears he was influenced by John Ruskin, an English artist and commentator who wrote an analysis of tree growth patterns a century before biologists systematically documented the "architecture" of trees. The article is illustrated with line drawings of tree branching patterns which parallel some of the patterns found in Church's rather romantic, yet botanically accurate paintings. Top Mary Ellen Bute (1906-1983): Science and Art in Film Animation is a field in which art and science meet. One of the first movie animators, Mary Ellen Bute, made abstract images in films using numerous techniques. She claimed that one technique, the use of an oscilloscope to create the main "figures" in her work in the 1950s, was the first combination of art and science of this kind. Decades earlier, her first filmmaking effort in 1934 was inspired by collaborating with a musician who believed he could reduce all music to mathematical formulae, and she attempted to show that his system worked by using visual images to illustrate music. An article in Animation World Network describes her desire to experiment as an artist using science: "She studied stage lighting at Yale in an attempt to gain the technical expertise to create a 'color organ' which would allow her to paint with living light." http://www.awn.com/mag/issue1.2/articles1.2/moritz1.2.html Top Santiago Ramon y Cajal (1852-1934): Frustrated Artist is Nobel Prize Winner Santiago Ramon y Cajal from Madrid earned the 1906 Nobel Prize in Medicine for work on the nervous system, including the discovery of neurons. As a youth he wanted to be an artist but his father wouldn't let him, so instead he went into medicine. He apparently found an outlet for his drawing skills within the medical realm. Original glass microscope slides prepared by the "Father of Neuroscience" are the first historically important scientific artifacts to be flown in space. You can find out who Santiago Ramon y Cajal is, see the slides and some drawings of nerve cells made by Dr. Cajal. Copies of these original drawings were also stowed aboard space shuttle Columbia. neurolab.jsc.nasa.gov/onboard.htm http://www.almaz.com/nobel/medicine/1906b.html http://www.nobel.se/medicine/laureates/1906/cajal-bio.html Top Georg von Békésy (1899-1972): Chemist Chemist and art collector Georg von Békésy won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1961 for his discoveries of the physical mechanism of stimulation within the cochlea. He had worked on long-distance communication, and tha t led to his work on the mechanics of human hearing. He collected paintings, artifacts and statues from cultures around the world. He used a similar process for selecting objects for his art collection as he had used in organizing his research: a method of constantly comparing related objects. His art collection is now owned by the Nobel Foundation. http://www.pbrc.hawaii.edu/bekesy/von_bekesy.html Top Borodin and Elgar - Chemistry and Composing This biography of Borodin reveals a lot of stories which relate to his involvement in both music and chemistry. When studying for a while in Italy, he divided his time equally between the fields. Early in his career he was primarily a chemist, and later in life was largely a composer. The writer also mentions other chemists with a connection to music: Sir william Herschel, Patrick Moore, Thomas Campion, and Sir Edward Elgar, among others. Elgar apparently had a fascination with chemistry, making hydrogen sulfide and soap in his own basement laboratory. Eventually he switched from chemistry to microscopes as an avocation. http://www.geocities.com/cahmn/Essays/Borodin.htm Top List of Musician-Scientists This is an inspiring resource, listing people with music - science connections. Someone helped a friend to save public funding of music education by building the argument that people in science and other fields use music in their lives as well. The list was a result of that effort. http://www.geocities.com/Vienna/3941/thelist.html Top Arnold Fanck (1889 - 1974): Geologist - Filmmaker Arnold Fanck (1889, Frankenthal, Germany - 1974) was a geologist and devoted mountain climber. After the First World War he made several documentaries and features known as Berg-Filme, with mountain-climbing scenes on location rather than in the studio. Top William Carlos Williams (1883 - 1963): Doctor and Poet Doctor and poet William Carlos Williams was born in Rutherford, New Jersey (1883). He studied medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned his M.D. and became friends with the poet Ezra Pound. Williams eventually broke with literary celebrities like Pound and T.S. Eliot. He didn't like their obscure and complicated European style. Williams committed himself to writing poetry in the rhythms and patterns of common American speech. He wrote clear, precise poetry that was often inspired by his work as a doctor. He said, "When they ask me....how I have for so many years continued an equal interest in medicine and the poem, I reply that they amount for me to nearly the same thing." (Adapted from Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac, 9-17-03) http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/119 Top George Washington Carver, Jr. (1865 - 1943): Agriculturalist Scientist and educator George Washington Carver, Jr. had been thinking of a career as an artist before he became an agriculturist and earned fame for finding industrial applications for farm products. Four of his paintings of flowers were included in an exhibit in 1892, and one was sent to the World’s Colombian Exhibition in Chicago. In college he decided to pursue a career in agriculture, though he did continue painting later in life. He was musical as well: Carver played piano in fund-raising concerts for the Tuskegee Institute. http://www.africawithin.com/bios/george_carver.htm http://www.princeton.edu/~mcbrown/display/carver.html Top Fillipo Brunelleschi (1377 -1446), Renaissance Engineer Fillipo Brunelleschi, now regarded as the greatest architect and engineer of the Renaissance, designed the first self-supporting dome for the Cathedral in Florence, using a herringbone pattern of 4 million bricks and some sandstone rings. His work was featured in a recent PBS show, “Medici, Godfathers of the Renaissance.” http://www.pbs.org/empires/medici/renaissance/brunelleschi.html Top John Constable (1776-1837): Cloudy Day Painter In the nineteenth century, landscape painter John Constable was fascinated with clouds, and in 1821 and 1822 painted cloud studies nearly every day. When he did this "skying," he noted exact weather conditions of each painting or drawing session. He learned the importance of observing the sky at an early age because of the importance of the weather to his father’s wind-powered mill. Many of his cloud studies were on display at the Salander-O’Reilly Galleries (New York), reviewed by the New York Times June 11, 2004. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9801E6DA1430F932A25755C0A9629C8B63

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