Saturday, June 16, 2012

What do you see?

I remember my first trip to the University of Michigan Museum of Natural History when I was little; the gallery of evolution is a huge room filled with skeletons, fossils, and stuffed animals of all kinds, and I wanted to look at every single one. A particularly interesting specimen was what initially appears to be an abstract painting, but upon closer examination reveals itself to be composed of the bodies of various bats and insects. (I was horrified, but couldn’t seem to tear my eyes away from it!) Victorian exhibition slides are another excellent example of the results of a combined interest in art and the beauty of nature as it was coming to be better understood.


Wow, this exhibit has its own Wikipedia page!

This is a Victorian microscope slide made up of arranged diatoms.

However, the introduction of modern biological ideas was far from the first time that science and art came together to provide a new perspective of our world. The very first art forms found in archaeological sites around the world are remarkably similar images of the human body; these are not necessarily anatomically accurate (this would have to wait for da Vinci), but they demonstrate the importance that fertility and survival held in the daily lives of our ancestors.


These figurines are called Venuses, and over 100 of them have been found throughout the world.

Did you know?  Leonardo da Vinci had to steal corpses in order to study human anatomy because the subject was so taboo during his time.

I must admit, I was surprised when my first college-level ecology class began with a trip out to Kellogg Forest to draw whatever we observed. This class only met ten times - what could possibly be so important about observations? Surely we had learned about such things in other science classes. But I was wrong: art is a really interesting aspect of science, and our observations are some of our most valuable tools when studying ecology. The first day that we all went out and worked on our artwork, the majority of the resulting pieces portrayed a macroscopic view of nature, such as a landscape or riverscape. By the last day of class, however, our artwork was divided exactly in half between microscopic and macroscopic perspectives of what we saw in Kellogg Forest, and many drawings and paintings contained readily identifiable species. I was surprised by this shift in perspective towards the more detailed, actually, because I think that this class opened my mind to a more big-picture view of what I normally consider to be relatively separate organisms and processes.


A beautiful drawing by Cristy!


This cake was tasty and educational!

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