| |
 |
Star pinpoints date of Van Gogh's canvas
|
ASTRONOMERS have pinpointed the day when Vincent van Gogh painted one of his canvases thanks to the position of the planet Venus in the tableau.
"The White House at Night", which hangs in St Petersburg's Hermitage Museum, shows a house at twilight with a prominent star with a yellow halo in the sky.
Astronomers at Southwest Texas State University in San Marcos calculated that the star is Venus, which was bright in the evening sky in June 1890, when Van Gogh is believed to have painted the picture, the British weekly New Scientist reports in next Saturday's issue.
They then organized a field trip to the small town of Auvers-sur-Oise, northwest of Paris, and located the white house itself, thus enabling them to work out the position from where Van Gogh made the painting.
The researchers, Donald Olson and Russell Doescher, say the canvas was painted from the bottom up during the course of an afternoon and early evening.
"You can see it's about 7pm from the sunlight on the house, but as the sun sets, Venus becomes bright and obvious," said Doescher, who added that he was astonished by the accuracy of the star's position in the picture.
Using computer programmes, the astronomers calculated that Venus was in the position shown in the painting at around 8pm on June 16 1890 -- just six weeks before the artist killed himself.
"The White House at Night" has a history almost as turbulent as Van Gogh's. It was hidden from Nazi looters and only re-emerged in Russia in 1995, after the fall of the Soviet Union.
Last November, Cambridge University scientist Kate Spence gave a remarkably accurate estimate of when the Great Pyramids were made, based on the position of stars in two prominent constellations believed to have been used by the architects to line up the structures.
She said work on the Great Pyramid of Cheops began between 2485 and 2475 BC. Eight other Egyptian pyramids were built between 2600 and 2400 BC, but their alignments are somewhat different from that of Cheops because of the steady drift of the stars, according to Spence.(SD-Agencies)
|
|
|
|
