SciArt Magazine - All Issues February 2016 | Page 9

Left: Frank Stella, The Fountain,
1992. Woodcut, etching, aquatint,
relief, drypoint, collage, and airbrush.
91 x 275 3/4 in. (231.1 x 700.4 cm).
Whitney Museum of American Art;
gift of Marabeth Cohen-Tyler and
Kenneth Tyler 2015.97a-c. © 2015
Frank Stella/Artists Rights Society
(ARS), New York. Photograph by
Steven Sloman.
Left below: Frank Stella, Grajau I,
1975. Paint and laquer on aluminum.
82 x 132 in. (208.3 x 335.3 cm). The
Glass House, A Site of the National
Trust for Historic Preservation. ©
2015 Frank Stella/Artists Rights
Society (ARS), New York.

provided by Homer’s Odyssey when the returning heroes
have to face the danger of the giant whirlpool of Charybdis: “But when she swallowed the salt water down,
the whole interior of her vortex was exposed, the rocks
re–echoed to her fearful roar, and the dark sands of the
sea bottom came into view.”5 During the Middle Ages,
Dante interpreted Homer’s description as a descent into
the underworld and in the seventh book of the Inferno
condemned Odysseus to hell through a whirlpool as
punishment for his evil deeds during the Trojan War. In
contrast to these terrifying and destructive vortices, the
spiral was a life–enhancing force in Celtic and Teutonic
cultures. The Christian religion adopted it as a symbol
of eternal life from these pagan mythologies. Thus, the
spiral motif plays a dominant role in such objects as Irish
stone crosses and Celtic illuminated manuscripts. It is
noteworthy that Stella wrote his senior thesis at Princeton University on such abstract patterns in manuscript
illumination.

In contrast to fantastical speculations about vortices,
Aristotle was probably the first person to separate the
study of their natural causes from myth, writing in his
treatise Meterologica: “A whirlwind thus arises when a
storm that has been produced is unable to free itself
from the cloud; it is caused by the resistance of the
vortex, and occurs when the spiral sinks to the earth
and carries with it the cloud from which it is unable to
separate itself.”6
Following Aristotle’s model of scientific observation,
Leonardo da Vinci used his brilliant drawings of vortices

SciArt in America February 2016

as a method to study fluid dynamics and thus provided
a bridge between the Renaissance and modern scientific analysis. In his early years, Leonardo perceived
the vortex as a manifestation of motion and power and
applied wavy and spiral lines as stylistic elements in his
paintings. Later in life, Leonardo increasingly pursued a
more scientific mastery of forms of motion. His sketch
pads and such manuscripts as De retrosi dell’acqua (1492)
testify to his deep understanding of vortex patterns, including the seemingly random effects of turbulence that
he was probably the first to describe. At the end of his
life, Leonardo revived the age–old belief in the cosmic
whirl, combining his scientific study of turbulence with
a mystical and apocalyptic perception of the overwhelming power of nature. Leonardo’s synthesis of science and
imagination in these majestically complicated drawings
is a particularly important precedent for Stella’s art.
During the 16th and 17th centuries, the world was
shaken by the discoveries of Copernicus, Galileo, and
Johannes Kepler. While Galileo believed the orbits of
planets to be ideally circular, Kepler’s discovery of elliptic orbits necessitated a new explanation for planetary
motion. For Kepler, the elliptical paths of planets were
caused by magnetic attraction and repulsion of the sun,
and the model for such disturbances was in the vortex
patterns that he observed in the world around him.
One foundational stone for René Descartes’ unified
mathematical treatise was his vortex theory, based on
Kepler’s research and his own belief that, in the absence
of a vacuum, bodies can interact with each other only by

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