Look To The Skies: Understanding Time And Climate Through Paintings

MADRID — How does a meteorologist look at a painting?

“We see some clouds and can deduce from them that it is a typical spring day. They are cumulus clouds,” explains the physicist and author José Miguel Viñas, known as @divulgameteo on social networks, standing before a marina painting by Eúgene Boudin. Pointing to different parts of the canvas, he indicates, like a Sherlock Holmes of brushstrokes, some clues to continue deducing the time and weather represented in the painting.

“Different details indicate that there is wind. If you have good eyesight, you will be able to see that in the background there is a ship with smoke coming out of it, and you will see that the plume of smoke moves to the right side. But the plume is very horizontal. That indicates atmospheric stability. It’s not a day when in two hours there’s going to be a big storm,” he concludes.

Viñas is preparing to give a tour, organized by the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum in Madrid, to present his book Skies Portrayed. A Journey Through Time and Climate in Painting (“Los cielos retratados. Viaje a través del tiempo y el clima en la pintura”). As we wait for it to start, we already look at the large painting in the hall with different eyes. Suddenly, it seems the protagonists are not the angels we’ve always looked at, but the clouds that support them. It’s as if the idea Viñas present in his book uncovers a layer that has always been there, but that we have not paid much attention to.

Viñas starts his tour with a warning: the representation of the sky should not be taken literally. The colors and lights often are not a reflection of reality but of the emotions it sparked within the artists — or that they already carried within. Even so, painters, especially in certain periods, used what they saw as motifs for their paintings and ended up creating an archive of the climate over time and space.

Velázquez’s skies and Goya’s snows

For example, many works from the mid-16th century have left evidence of what is known as the “Little Ice Age,” a period of very low temperatures with strong and persistent frosts. This is the case with the paintings by Flemish Renaissance artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Viñas dedicates a chapter to explaining how the succession of harsher than usual winters became a pictorial subject, something that he had not seen before: European winter landscapes.

In many works, frozen rivers and lakes are the setting for the representation of a different way of living, strongly conditioned by the climate. A couple of centuries later, something similar would happen with Spanish painter Francisco Goya. His painting The Snowstorm, which stands out for its mastery of painting with white on white, echoes the harshness of the winter that hit Castile in 1787.

The book begins as this adventure began for Viñas: looking for examples of each of the cloud types in paintings by different painters. Some make the search easier, like English landscape painter John Constable, who actually carried out his own cloud studies: “cirrus”, “nimbus”, and “stratocumulus”, can be read on the back of some of his sketches or in the title of some engravings.

Viñas stops in front of Summer Clouds by Emil Nolde to point out that those clouds “are bad.”

In other cases, the meteorologist’s detective skills have to come into play. There are altostratus in George Inness’ Morning and cumulonimbus in The Approaching Storm by Constant Troyon. Those cotton-like clouds that almost all of us sketch when we learn how to draw are cumulus clouds; and some of their relatives, the altocumulus, are those other elongated formations that are often seen in the works of Salvador Dalí. And sometimes the shape of clouds can even become a characteristic of a painter’s style.

“We use the expression ‘Velázquez skies’ to refer to complex, tangled skies, with the presence of cirrostratus and altostratus that extend horizontally, completely covering the celestial vault,” Viñas explains in his book. Although the sky over Madrid is normally clearer, research has led him to confirm when Diego Velázquez painted some of his best-known commissions, the city experienced a milder winter than usual. Hence those “high and medium stratified clouds” that became a recognizable feature of the Spanish painter’s works.

But in other cases, artistic license does not escape the meteorologist’s keen eye. Viñas stops in front of Summer Clouds by Emil Nolde to point out with a playful gesture that those clouds “are bad.” Not because of their shape: They are cottony and very white, as would be typical of cumulus clouds in a tropical environment.

They are bad because of their location: This type of cloud only forms over land, and not over water as the German-Danish expressionist painted them. “The atoll is missing,” he concludes, before continuing on his way.

The added value of skies

The tour stops in front of other paintings that capture with notable precision the atmosphere of certain moments of the day or year. A Mediterranean Coast Scene with Fishermen and Boats by Claude-Joseph Vernet or Evening on the Prairie by Albert Bierstadt are cited in a chapter dedicated to light and how the position of the sun influences each image.

From the Renaissance onward, atmospheres began to be reflected in paintings in a precise way. Shadows, mists, and dawns are a challenge for artists, who seek to faithfully reproduce their colors.

Later, currents such as Impressionism tried to capture what was changeable. For this reason, paintings also help in understanding how meteorological phenomena happen. We stop in front of a painting that is part of Camille Pissarro’s Road to Versailles series. In it, the snow is already melting at the edges of the road.

But if we could put it next to the other paintings in this series — found in museums around the world — we would see the change in seasons, from the arrival of the cold to the return of spring. The same could be done with Claude Monet’s studies of water lilies, for example: In his iconic series of aquatic flowers, a careful eye can the thaw occur.

“There is added value in the skies,” Viñas says. “They are not simple backdrops. In them, you can see what the artist has experienced and captured.” This is why paintings also represent, intentionally or not, testimonies of particular extreme events.

This is the case of The Flood in Port-Marly by Alfred Sisley. In this series, the Impressionist painter captured the moment when the waters of the Seine flooded the small town where had his workshop.

For these reasons, paintings can also be a source of information for historical climatology. When observing the red and orange skies of William Turner’s landscapes, one might think that they respond faithfully to the tones of a sunrise or sunset, or perhaps that they could be a reflection of an emotional state. But Viña suggests another option: the “volcanic hypothesis.”

Painting climate change

As Viña explains in his book, “the gigantic eruption of the Tambora volcano in 1815 left distinguishable traces in the skies portrayed by both Turner and other painters during the years following the eruption.” Hence his use of these colors.

The eruption of Krakatoa in 1883 could be the key to the color tones of paintings such as The Scream by Norwegian artist Edvard Munch. Beyond avant-gardism, it seems the Scandinavian skies at the time were indeed reddish due to polar stratospheric clouds merged with volcanic particles still suspended in the air, which would have increased the effect.

For Viñas, “this change in the intensity of the colors observed for several years in various places in Europe remained in the memory of the painters and changed their palette, whether they were aware of it or not.”

However, not everything is a literal representation. Some meteorological elements are also coded as symbolic. Storms, for example, become a way of expressing the religious dichotomy between good and evil, paradise and hell, as Viñas explains in front of the Christ in the Storm of the Sea of Galilee by Jan Brueghel the Elder, a painting so small that it is almost reproduced life-size in the book —profusely illustrated with images of the works analyzed. There, the threat of misfortune translates into the intense blue waves that shake the apostles’ boat.

But above all what we must pay attention to is what no longer appears in the paintings.

When you know how to look with attention like this meteorologist does, paintings can also reveal other more immediate and tangible threats, such as the climate crisis. Viñas explains that climate change can be followed through the work of Canaletto, for example. His faithful depictions of Venice make it possible to see the water level of the canals three centuries ago. From there, all you have to do is compare.

And today? To understand climate change through contemporary painting, Viñas points out, we must look at what is represented but also at what is not.

“Maybe someone went out to paint when [the 2021 winter] Storm Filomena happened, and we certainly already have those paintings. But above all what we must pay attention to is what no longer appears in the paintings. There are motifs that used to be recurring that are now difficult for a landscape artist to paint because they can’t be seen anymore,” he explains.

And on the other hand, others will begin to appear more often. Perhaps artists, without even realizing it, are already preparing their palettes with more ocher pigments, like the droughts and deserts that surround us.