A new study revealed a surprising yet shocking detail about trees depicted in the artwork of famous painters like Leonardo da Vinci and Piet Mondrian.
The study has found that the way trees are painted by these artists follows the same mathematical patterns seen in real tree growth in nature.
As per The Independent, hidden mathematical patterns found in some abstract paintings might help our brains recognize them as tress.
The research explains that real trees grow in a fractal pattern, where similar structures repeat at smaller and smaller scales from the trunk to the branch tips.
In the new study, scientists recognize the mathematical patterns in the way tree branches are drawn in artworks.
They created mathematical rules to explain the relationship between branches thickness and the number of branches of different sizes.
“We analyse trees in artwork as self-similar, fractal forms, and empirically compare art with theories of branch thickness developed in biology,” researchers explained.
Leonardo da Vinci noticed that as tree limbs branch out, they maintain a similar thickness.
To understand this, he used a parameter called (alpha) to figure out how diameters of different branches relate to each other.
Later, researchers discovered that the value of a (alpha) in the artwork they studied which relates to the thickness of tree branches, falls between 1.5 and 2.8 which is similar to the values found in real trees.
Surprisingly, even in abstract paintings like Piet Mondrian's 1912 cubist Gray Tree, which doesn’t use realistic tree colours, it can still be identified as a tree if the proper mathematical value for alpha is applied.
