“While fractal dimension varies considerably across trees and artwork, we find that the range of α in case studies of great artworks across cultures and time periods corresponds to the range of real trees,” they said.
Even abstract paintings such as Piet Mondrian's 1912 cubist Gray Tree, which doesn’t visually show treelike colours, can be identified as trees if a realistic value for α is used, researchers say.
Trees depicted in the artwork of famous painters like Leonardo da Vinci and Piet Mondrian follow the math behind their branching pattern in nature, a new study says.
Researchers analysed trees in art from several parts of the world, including those in the 16th-century Sidi Saiyyed Mosque in Ahmedabad, India, Edo period Japanese painting, and 20th-century abstract art.
They found that the values of α in these artworks range from 1.5 to 2.8, similar to the range of this value in natural trees.
