In 1889, Vincent van Gogh was facing his demons at an asylum at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, and, over the course of just a few weeks, he created one of the most iconic paintings of all time—The Starry Night. The masterpiece has always been interpreted as a reflection of van Gogh’s fractured psyche. He only a year earlier severed a portion of his left ear after suffering a mental breakdown.
But the swirling skies in his masterpiece might be more than a projection of his inner turmoil. According to a new study, van Gogh’s depiction of the night sky is an uncannily accurate representation of a complex physical phenomenon: turbulence.
Hidden Turbulence in the Stars
For years, the swirling blue sky, dotted with bright yellow stars and a crescent moon, has captivated art lovers with its dynamic movement. Now, scientists have peered deeper into the painting to reveal something extraordinary: Van Gogh may have unintentionally captured the physics of atmospheric turbulence.
Researchers in China and France analyzed the spatial scale of the painting’s brushstrokes and the way light appears to ripple around the stars, using a high-resolution digital image.
“With a high-resolution digital picture, we were able to measure precisely the typical size of the brushstrokes and compare these to the scales expected from turbulence theories,” said marine scientist Yongxiang Huang, one of the authors of the study.
They found that the painting aligns with a concept known as Kolmogorov’s law — a mathematical theory that predicts the energy transfer in turbulent flows through different scales of motion within a fluid. In a turbulent flow, large eddies or swirls of fluid break down into smaller and smaller ones, cascading energy from large-scale motion to increasingly finer scales, until it dissipates as heat at the molecular level.
It’s a phenomenon commonly seen in atmospheric or oceanic systems and Van Gogh’s night sky, filled with swirling shapes of varying sizes, seems to capture this process with surprising accuracy.
A New Look at Van Gogh’s Mastery
The idea of turbulence in Van Gogh’s work isn’t new. Past studies had already hinted at the alignment between The Starry Night and turbulence theory. But what makes this latest research stand out is how deeply it dives into the finer details of the painting — down to the individual brush strokes. By examining the brightness, or luminance, of van Gogh’s colors, the researchers treated the painting as if it were a physical system, where brightness represented energy flow.
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Their analysis uncovered something even more remarkable: while the large swirls in the sky align with Kolmogorov’s law, the microcosm of Van Gogh’s brush strokes — where the light fades and diffuses — follows a different principle known as Batchelor’s scaling. This second type of scaling describes how energy behaves on a much smaller scale, where diffusion takes over from turbulence. “It reveals a deep and intuitive understanding of natural phenomena,” said Huang.
Finding both scalings in one atmospheric system is rare, and the iconic Dutch artist seems to have captured multiple dimensions of atmospheric physics.
The researchers didn’t stop at The Starry Night. They found similar patterns in two other paintings from van Gogh’s later period —Wheatfield with Crows and Road with Cypress and Star — suggesting that this phenomenon wasn’t a one-off. Van Gogh, it seems, had an exceptional ability to translate the physical world into art.
More Than Just Art
Van Gogh’s intuitive grasp of physics, particularly in capturing such complex movement, is nothing short of remarkable and reveals an innate understanding of nature.
According to Huang, more recent research has prodded scientists to rethink how we define turbulence itself. Traditionally, turbulence is believed to be exclusive to high Reynolds number flows — where inertia dominates and viscosity plays a minor role. But as the study authors note, turbulence-like behavior has been observed at much smaller scales in recent years.
“It seems it is time to propose a new definition of turbulence to embrace more situations,” Huang said. The rare coexistence of both Kolmogorov and Batchelor scaling in one system—like van Gogh’s painting—could broaden our understanding of how turbulence manifests across different environments, from planetary atmospheres to the smallest scales in nature.
In the end, van Gogh’s painting may offer more than just aesthetic beauty. It presents a new lens through which to view both art and science, where intuition and physics converge in the swirling night sky.
The findings appeared in the journal Physics of Fluids.
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