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Medicine and art: one culture?

2009; Elsevier BV; Volume: 75; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1038/ki.2008.652

1523-1755

Giuseppe Remuzzi, Bruno Simini,

Medical History and Innovations

We happened to attend a fabulous lecture on the future of science and medicine by a distinguished scientist (a Nobel laureate), who started by saying that science and art are two different cultures. We have been very intrigued by this statement, which caused us to think about whether this is indeed the case. Some of these thoughts led to this piece. In ancient Greek the word τε′νη encompasses the practice both of art and of science; only later did its meaning drift off toward technique or technology. Is anything left nowadays of the original kinship between art and science? Do they still share anything? If so, what in their essence allies them? Peter Forbes writes, “reading a scientific paper that opens up a new field has a similar effect to reading a significant new voice in poetry for the first time: you are not sure where it will lead.”1.Forbes P. Poetry and science: greatness in little.Nature. 2005; 434: 320-323Crossref PubMed Scopus (1) Google Scholar Scientific progress has been baffling for centuries. Achievements in the arts have been just as bewildering. Artists and scientists alike put forth ideas or hypotheses, and test them, as the following examples illustrate. Take the frescoes in the church of Santa Caterina in Galatina, perhaps the finest of the late Trecento (fourteenth century) in Puglia, Italy. The paintings, by craftsmen from Naples, show diverse influences: Florentine art (in vogue in Naples at the time), French style (the frescoes were commissioned by an officer devoted to the French King Charles d'Anjou, who had just conquered Puglia), Middle Eastern culture (Raimondello Orsini, who completed the church, had traveled to Jerusalem). The frescoes are the result of an uncommon ability in merging various cultures. The craftsmen’s outstanding curiosity and observation, their diverse origins and experiences, and their capacity to integrate enabled them to fuse in a new vision the prevailing cultures of their time. The pathways of science are surprisingly similar. The painters in Galatina could have been scientists. Artists, like researchers, choose and develop their own paths. Cimabue, one of the greatest Italian artists of the Duecento (thirteenth century), was born in Florence. As a young man he opted to break away from conventional Byzantine art and its most renowned follower in Florence at the time, Coppo di Marcovaldo. He went to Pisa instead, to work with Giunta Pisano. Compare Cimabue's crucifix in the church of San Domenico in Arezzo with Marcovaldo's in San Giminiano. Marcovaldo's Christ, in Byzantinesque style, is stiff. Cimabue's, reminiscent of Giunta's crucifix in Bologna, has an elegant posture and slender body proportions. Giunta and Cimabue, unlike Coppo, show great interest in anatomical detailing. In his Florentine crucifix in Santa Croce, Cimabue went still further; arm and forearm, for instance, arenaturally merged at the elbow. To us, and to the artists of his time, Cimabue proves to be an independent observer and an innovative genius who anticipates the spirit of the Renaissance. It is perhaps superfluous to mention Leonardo when dealing with art, science, and their links. Integrating disciplines was advocated by the intellectuals of the Renaissance; Leonardo achieved it. His anatomical and physiological drawings have not ceased to inspire artists and scientists. Leonardo’s imaging describes so vividly how blood flow affects the closure of the mitral valve and determines the direction of flow that Francis Well, a cardiac surgeon in Cambridge, UK, observing these sketches, redesigned a technique to repair this valve. In his tudes de Sociologie de l'Art, 2.Francastel P. Tudes de Sociologie de l’Art: Création Picturale et Société. Gallimard, Paris1989: 256Google Scholar Pierre Francastel observes that art is the result of imitation and variation. Artists study and are seduced by the work of other artists. Series and styles are so generated. Quite exceptionally is a really original masterpiece created. This is reminiscent of what happens in research. The right environment (laboratories for scientists, ateliers for artists) provides the right stimulus for brilliance to surface. Leonardo and other great artists of his time all came from Andrea del Verrocchio's workshop in Florence. Donald Seldin, J.L. Goldstein and M.S. Brown's mentor, remarked in 2003 that most great biomedical scientists come from just a few laboratories, those that have the right ingredients for talent to emerge. Sir Hans Krebs stated in 1967, “scientists are not so much born as made by those who teach them research.” A look at the biographies of distinguished scientists leaves little doubt that their careers are critically determined by outstanding teachers. Krebs intended to be an academic internist. While waiting for a position, he joined Neurath’s biochemistry laboratory at Washington University, where he worked with Ed Fischer. In his paper “The making of a scientist,”3.Krebs H.A. The making of a scientist.Nature. 1967; 215: 1441-1445Crossref PubMed Scopus (51) Google Scholar Krebs writes that this circumstance was instrumental in his being considered by the Nobel Prize committee. He also quotes Justus Freiherr von Liebig, the father of organic chemistry, telling Friedrich August Kekulé von Stradonitz, ‘if you wish to become a chemist you must be willing to work so hard as to ruin your health. He who is not prepared to do so will not get far in chemistry nowadays.’ This also applies to the arts. Otto Heinrich Warburg, Nobel laureate in 1931, after discovering the respiratory enzyme given his name, stated in an autobiographic note that ‘the most important event in the life of a young scientist is personal contact with the great scientists of his time.’4.Warburg O. Prefatory chapter.Ann Rev of Blochem. 1964; 33: 1-14Crossref PubMed Google Scholar Warburg was a student of Emil Hermann Fischer, who had been awarded a Nobel Prize in 1902 for synthesizing polypeptides from amino acids. In turn Emil Fischer had been a student of Adolf von Baeyer (Kekulé's student and a 1905 Nobel laureate). Warburg added that, in science, ‘solutions usually have to be forced by carrying out innumerable experiments without much critical hesitation.’ This happened in art between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Besides Caravaggio, it was mostly the Flemish painters who made works so realistic as to rival modern photography. Recently art historians have suspected that tricks were used to reach such perfect realism. Caravaggio, Van Dyck, Vermeer, Memling, Raphael, Giorgione, Bronzino, Velázquez, and Ingres all seem to have used optical systems made of lenses and mirrors to project onto their canvases, like slides on a screen, the images they then painted. An old document refers to works by Caravaggio as ‘small portraits painted with the aid of mirrors.’ His contemporaries claimed he was unable to paint without models. He left no drawings; X-rays of his works show no preparatory sketches. Caravaggio's characters are like actors on a set under spotlights (see, for instance, his Vocazione di San Matteo). ‘In pure research, the scientist uses his imagination in virtually the same way as the artist. He talks of a beautiful experiment rather than of an expedient one. Like the artist he is concerned with exploration for exploration's sake. If the results of the studies prove to be useful in the context of some specific survival goal, all to the good, but this is secondary.’5.Morris D. The Naked Ape: A Zoologist's Study of the Human Animal. Delta, New York1999: 256Google Scholar We sincerely thank Donald Seldin for excellent suggestions during the preparation of this article.