83. Art and nature

What is the relation between art and nature? I think that the world making of art is partly inspired by nature and our evolution in it. Here I am not falling back on the old notion of art as representation of nature. The connection lies on a deeper level of ways of world making.

Is it surprising that colours and shapes in nature are mostly seen as beautiful, or do we find them beautiful because we have evolved among them, as a species and in our lives? Earlier in this blog I argued that like our bodies our cognitive make-up must in some way reflect success in evolution, in adaptation to the world, because without it we would not have survived. In item 29 of this blog I proposed that the most urgent adaptation was that to objects (food, predators, prey, obstacles, tools) and agents (friend and foe) moving and acting in time and space, and that this has formed our fundamental cognitive apparatus, yielding a object bias in our conceptualization of abstract notions such as happiness, love, meaning, etc. that are not at all like objects existing and moving in time and space.

I now propose that something similar is happening in aesthetic judgement. We find things beautiful that we have adapted to and that helped us to adapt. In addition to the colours and forms in nature that I mentioned, this would then include shapes and movements that helped us to survive, such as a strong or fertile body, agility perceived as grace, movement in space, rhythm of movement, etc. Perhaps that also explains our fascination with sports.

Another example is perhaps the ubiquity of the golden rule[1] in both nature and architecture, painting and sculpture. In nature it is found, for example, in the dimensions of a snail’s house. In architecture it is found, for example, in the proportion between windows on different floors of 17^th century houses along canals in Amsterdam. What makes the canals so aesthetically pleasing is that while each house has its own shape of the gable, they share the golden proportion between the windows.

Some evidence of the instinctive application of the golden rule is the following. Once, I had an old house drastically restored by an architect friend. The structure consisted of two houses separated by a space that centuries ago was part of an alley between two rows of houses. The space was almost exactly square. The architect designed a glass roof over the space and somewhere in it a spiral stairway to a bridge connecting the first floors of the two houses. It was beautiful and I wondered whether by any chance that might have to do with the golden rule. I made measurements and found that the location of the stairway obeyed the golden rule in three dimensions (in the length and breadth of the space and in the point at which the steps along the stairway switched from pointing left to pointing right). I called the architect to tell him. He did not believe me and jumped in his car to come and confirm my measurements. He was astonished. It seems to have been part of his instinct.  

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[1] The golden rule is defined as the proportion between two line sections a and b where a/b = b/(a + b). The solution of this little mathematical equation is that a/b is roughly equal to 0.62