Art Predicting Life

MIT's Technology Review ponders a 17th century CE painting that depicts a telescope not invented at the time the painting was made...

It's hard to find an invention more emblematic of the birth of modern science than the telescope. And yet surprisingly little is known about its early development. The inventor of the telescope remains unknown to this day.

Now, one of Brueghel's works appears to show a Keplerian-style telescope in a painting dating from 15 years before this design was thought to have been built.

Maggie Koerth-Baker is the science editor at BoingBoing.net. She writes a monthly column for The New York Times Magazine and is the author of Before the Lights Go Out, a book about electricity, infrastructure, and the future of energy. You can find Maggie on Twitter and Facebook.

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Anonymous

@scifijazznik

–don’t worry; I’m a certified BFA carrying farting artist, and Picasso and co. don’t do much for me either. Particularly the work that Picasso’s “I had to spend years un-learning how to draw” comment resulted in. Fortunately, the wing of the art world that thrives on pretension is withering and dying as the world at large realizes that the emperor has no clothes. Exciting times are ahead as art becomes wonderful again. They’re here now, actually, if you look in the right places and ignore the crap.
- Tzctlp
  
  Are you saying Picasso was pretentious? And you call yourself an artist?
  
  You are clearly an ignorant, er, artist, if there was ever an oxymoron since both categories are mutually exclusive.
cratermoon

Why hasn’t anyone yet suggested that the art community has simply misdated the painting?
- weeklyrob
  
  Total guess, but I figure there are records for when he painted it. Probably commissioned to do it and the financials are all on paper.
  
  That doesn’t mean that someone couldn’t have painted a telescope on it LATER, though.
Halloween Jack

If you think that’s something, wait until she figures out how to use the vibrator that I left behind.
Jonathan Badger

@cratermoon
Spoilsport. I was envisioning a scenario where time travelers stranded in the 17th century convinced the artist to include the anachronism in order to alert their colleagues of their need for help.
- Svenski
  
  Michael Crighton’s novel Timeline did just that. It was an o.k. book and a terrible movie.
  - Brainspore
    
    Hated the book, myself- mostly because the characters’ motivations made no sense whatsoever. I mean, what kind of supervillain has a time machine and decides to use it to build historically accurate amusement parks?
Anonymous

Obviously it’s just an arabic antique…
danlalan

If you don’t write it down, it never happened….
Anonymous

Looks like a regular old kaleidoscope to me.

I’m more curious about the multitude of flat panel displays and what appears to be a couple of tablet PCs behind the pooch. Computers, software, and the electricity to run them, all back then. Who would have guessed?
Anonymous

That Betamax tape bottom center is a little more worrying…
hippocampus

I read the book “Secret Knowledge” by David Hockney. It suggests that the telescope and various optical devices were semi-secret tools of the time. They were important to see invaders from far away and to plan defenses when the villagers decided to “storm the castle”. There was a technical advance in art in Italy at the time of the development of optics. Private craftsmen have always been able to develop prototypes far ahead of the average manufactured example.
Jonathan Badger

@Brainspore
Haven’t read the book or seen the movie, but it doesn’t surprise me — Crichton had amusement parks on the brain, it seems. Artificially intelligent robots? Amusement Park. Cloned Dinosaurs? Amusement Park. Time Travel? Amusement Park, why not?
JoshuaZ

Alternatively, why isn’t this considered evidence that we have the date for the creation of the telescope wrong? Frankly, that strikes me as more probable than someone making one in a painting that happens to look exactly like a real one.
Brainspore

The actual article doesn’t say anything about “Art Predicting Life,” it’s more along the lines of “oh look, new evidence shows we may have been wrong about when and where this thing was invented.”

Calling this “Art Predicting Life” is like finding a 80,000-year-old cave painting showing somebody hunting with a bow and concluding that the artist was predicting the future instead of adjusting your estimation of when the bow was invented.
jfrancis

his [patent] application was rejected, apparently because the idea was already well known.

—

I wish they would do it like that today.
ArtistInEurope

There is a second painting, “Allegory of Sight and Sound”, by the same artist that has a different telescope in it.
See it here:
http://www.wga.hu/html/b/bruegel/jan_e/2/5sense61.html
Giraffe

skateboards were invented in the 50s, as far as we know and multiple artists, including Miro painted charachters riding skateboards long before then.
airship

It looks to me like she’s sitting in front of her PC uploading naughty pictures of herself to the early internets.
technogeek

The other possibility is that what looks to us like a telescope may have been intended to be something else (or several something-elses) entirely — the “face on mars” effect.
- scifijazznik
  
  I agree. One could easily deduce from the painting that it’s a device to examine angel armpits or collect and distill angel armpit sweat.
Clifton

For the people who didn’t bother following the link, the painting isn’t dated to before the invention of the telescope.

It’s dated before the first known invention of the type of telescope that a couple of scientists who looked at this painting thought it looked like. So another alternative is that they are just wrong about what type of telescope it was.
Giraffe

isnt there a Joan Miro painting from the 40′s that depicts a colorful character riding a skateboard?
Daemon

“Art predicting life”?

Doesn’t this just mean that this particular telescope design was invented earlier than previousely expected?
Anonymous

I’m not shocked at this at all. There is evidence to support the idea that Caravaggio and other Baroque artists in the late 1500s used optics to produce the high level of detail and photographically accurate perspective and shading in their paintings.

If artists of the time were using optics, it’s not that much of a stretch to think that perhaps scientists had been spending time playing with optics well before then.

I mean really is it that much of a stretch to think that a scientist after observing the effects of a single lens would try various configurations of multiple lenses? I don’t think it would be long before some sort of telescope was created. I mean, a telescope isn’t all that complex.

Perhaps it was one of those devices that was felt to be more of a gimmick at the time of it’s first invention and it wasn’t until Galileo started making all kinds of cool observations using it that it became so important. Suddenly everyone wanted to take the credit for it’s invention.
Darren Garrison

Forget the telescope– that kid has wings!
- zedomax
  
  LMAO, agree. When will we see wings, with DNA technology, not TOO far away.
scifijazznik

And my artsy fartsy friends don’t understand why Picasso scares the shit out of me.
The Chemist

Photoshopped, obviously.

I’m more interested in how a 17th century artist got a Mac.
scifijazznik

The painting also predicts the need for interior decorators.

Or maybe it’s predicting pathological hoarding. Add about 93 cats to the picture and that place could be on A&E.

I’ve studied the painting for a good two minutes and I can’t find any evidence that it predicted Thomas Kinkade.
Anonymous

There is also a giant time-turner in the lefthand side of the painting. Maybe it was the result of time travel.
Anonymous

telescope? what about the laptop she’s plugging away on???
Rob Cruickshank

If you’re in the habit of hanging around naked, with a naked kid (winged or not), telescopes, monkeys and a pug in the room, you might want to pull the drapes. Just sayin’.