The impact of crystals and crystallography in art and culture
Juan Manuel Garcia-Ruiz
Laboratorio de Estudios Cristalográficos. Instituto Andaluz de Ciencias de la Tierra. CSIC-University of Granada, Granada. Spain
juanma.garciaruiz@gmail.com
Along with the invaluable contribution of crystallography to the
advancement of science and technology, the very idea of crystal has been
highly influential in the world of art and culture. This influence has changed
throughout history in correlation with increasing scientific knowledge about
crystals. Since the origin of consciousness, hundreds of thousands of years
ago, human fascination for crystals has been so deeply rooted in our brains as
to shape our perception of patterns. During prehistory, crystals had
teleological and theological connotations derived from a hidden power of their
singularity among the natural objects. Later on, since the classical world to
the emergence of positive science in the eighteenth century, scholars and
experts endorsed mineral crystals with healing powers. The sheer beauty of the
external forms of crystals and all they evoke fascinated educated people at
that time. But the higher impact on mind and cultures started in XIX century.
At that time, the extraordinary connection between the external harmony,
redundantly beautiful symmetry of crystals, and the perfect internal order,
periodic and iterative, was demonstrated. Since then, the word crystal is full
of evocations such as purity, transparency, beauty, equilibrium, rationality,
intelligence, energy, power . . . The notion of crystal transcended scientific
thinking also to inspire the arts, from literature to painting, from
architecture to dance, from music to filmmaking. Thus, the existence of a sharp
boundary dividing the realm of biology and sensuality and the realm of minerals
and cold rationality has pervaded the landscape of arts and philosophy for
centuries. Crystals and crystallographic theories have played an important role
in the intellectual construction of that proposed boundary. I will explore how
well founded is such a centennial controversy between two opposite ways to
understand and practice art and what the future holds. I will base the
discussion of well-known historical artistic debates in which crystals were
central to the controversy, and the last advances in the morphogenesis of
crystalline materials.
The author acknowledges funding from the European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) / ERC grant agreement nº 340863.