Just a few weeks ago it was announced that the St. John Altarpiece by Francescuccio Ghissi was going to be exhibited at the North Carolina Museum of Art (NCMA) for the first time in more than 100 years. The piece features nine scenes: eight small ones and a larger panel at the centre portraying the Crucifixion. As the years passed the panel was dismembered into parts and sold to different collectors and one section went lost.
The painting was recently restored by mathematical image analysis, a technique that has been around for a while and that was also applied to other purposes such as identifying a theological text integrated in the Ghent Altarpiece.
In the case of the Ghissi piece, artist and art reconstruction expert Charlotte Caspers was commissioned a replacement for the lost panel and designed the composition with NCMA curator David Steel.
Once it was finished, the other panels were studied via mathematical analysis, a high-resolution digital version of the new panel was then made to be sure that the sparkling and shiny gold of the new piece looked less bright and more subdued and that therefore matched with the rest of the artwork. The new panel was therefore aged and digitally printed.
In the same way the old panels were mapped, and their colours were rejuvenated, detecting also the in-paint the cracks (a method applied to the Ghent Altarpiece as well). A crack map was developed and overlaid on the original image. Then, via inpainting, the computer filled in the cracks with the colours directly adjacent to the cracks, creating in this way a smoother, crack-free image.
Algorithms were also employed to distinguish elements that pertained to the panel and elements that had been inserted after a restoration, that is a hardwood lattice or cradle inserted during a previous restoration process.
To this purpose an open source software solution called Platypus – that comes both as a standalone application and a Photoshop plugin and that removes cradling artifacts in X-ray images of paintings on panel – was developed by Ph.D. student Rachel Yin at the Department of Mathematics of the Duke University (North Carolina, USA). On the Platypus site you can see interesting examples of X-rayed works from the NCMA showing the cradle removal results (the two images on this post show for example a detail from the Master of the Laubenberg Altarpiece)
This project proved that rejuvenating and aging art is possible via mathematics, and working with art historians and art conservators has opened new solutions to mathematicians, showing that Maths can also be applied to other fields.
Yet mathematics will take centre stage in the next few months: the Mathematics Gallery at London's Science Museum, designed by the late Zaha Hadid, will finally open in December 2016.
Mathematics: The Winton Gallery will tell the history of mathematics from the Renaissance to the present day via artefacts and hand-held mathematical instruments selected from the science, technology, engineering and mathematics collections at the museum.
The objects will include a 17th century Islamic astrolabe that uses ancient mathematical techniques to map the night sky and an early example of the famous Enigma machine, but the centerpiece will be the experimental British 'Gugnunc' aircraft made by Handley Page as part of a 1929 competition to design an aircraft that could take off and land slowly and steeply without stalling.
The design of the gallery with its three-dimensional curved surfaces represents the aircraft's aerodynamic turbulence field, it is therefore conceived as a wind tunnel for the plane.
But mathematics is not just trendy in art and architecture, but in fashion as well: Anya Hindmarch showcased her S/S 17 collection in September during London Fashion Week in a vortex-shaped circular set-cum-amphitheatre bathed in white light.
Models circled it clad in colourful cocooning neoprene coats, then stopped at the centre of the vortex creating with their brightly coloured garments and accessories disruptions in the white light.
Fur pom-poms and Rubik's-cube leather charms dangled from bags, together with geometrical formations that seemed inspired by the models of solids you may find on display at the Science Museum in London.
Cube-shaped bags that formed ordered stacked towers (imagine a crossover between a multi-strata licorice candy and a Minecraft cube and you get the idea), suggested a colour-coded solution to organize a fashionista's chaos in multiple zippered compartments.
The bonded and thermowelded neoprene coats, many of them characterized by a rounded shoulder silhouette, were decorated with appliqued circular leather elements (were they maybe a hint at molecules?) that also reappeared on bags and sandals. Bright and bold shades of red, orange, peach, mint, and lilac prevailed.
Hindmarch then added an ironic Pop Art twist by taking the basic circle and turning it into fried eggs and acid-house/emoji smiley faces (some of these elements were borrowed from her own Autumn/Winter 2016-17 collection), so that the final effect looked a little bit "Prada meets Fiorucci in the basement of the Science Museum in London".
The show was very aptly entitled "Circulus" a name that evokes spirals and inspiring and mesmerizing geometric forms. Maths was therefore reinterpreted in this collection as an art form, and via the power of the circle.
Hindmarch selected a series of 10 artworks that went on auction during the Contemporary Curated exhibition at Sotheby's in September. The designer included Gerhard Richter, Jean Dubuffet, Tracey Emin, Ai Weiwei and Keith Haring in the event, but she also seemed to favour abstract and geometric art, and the latter must have turned into an inspiration for this collection.
Want to take further your interest into mathematics? Take a note about a couple of books you may want to read: the volume Mathematics: How It Shaped Our World (to be released in January) by Dr David Rooney, curator of the Mathematics Gallery at the Science Museum and Margot Lee Shetterly's Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race, the thrilling book (and soon a film) about the African-American women and mathematicians who analysed the data from wind tunnel tests of airplane prototypes and made a significant contribution to aeronautics and astronautics.
Guess these inspirations should be enough to stop us being filled with awe and terror as soon as we hear the word "Maths" and start instead feeling intrigued by this discipline.
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