Geology in Art

From the foreword of "Geology in Art":

This book began its journey with the development of Geodelia, a video installation invoking geology as a means for obtaining aesthetic inspiration. My work had a positive grip on the dance-addicted audience at the Boom Festival, an event dedicated to electronic music cross-pollinated with visual arts. At the time I thought I had made a discovery, a sort of philosopher’s stone capable of transmuting geology into art.
Unfortunately I was wrong. I did not bring anything new to light.
But I came to realize that the “alchemy” between geology and art has a long tradition. For instance, I remembered that my career as a paleontologist had started with the wonderful illustrated dinosaurs of Figuier, Burian and Moravec. Furthermore, the remote origins of geology are inextricably tied to art. During the Renaissance, art and geology were still mutually interlaced and not fully independent from each other.
In this scenario, many artists and naturalists dedicated ample work to the study of Earth sciences (Leonardo da Vinci, Konrad Gesner, Georgius Agricola, to name a few) and the word “geology” itself dates back to the Renaissance, when it was coined by Italian naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi. One of Aldrovandi’s most conspicuous legacies is his Museo, the catalogue of a vast assortment of objects, prefiguring the modern museum of natural history. Aldrovandi’s museum included artistic and geologic objects, put together to inform, inspire, amaze and entertain. It is not for nothing that collections like these were also known as Wunderkammern, or “Cabinets of Wonders”. I consider these Cabinets of Wonders evidence of the multiple aesthetic and scientific crossover that allowed the development of modern geology.
For these reasons, this book is based on a Wunderkammer as a structuring device. The creators of the Cabinets of Wonders were not just collectors, they were looking for patterns and associations between objects. Nevertheless, their idiom was visual and associative, not linguistic and logical.
Similarly, this book presents an alternative to the linear development of a theory of Geologic Art (GeoArt). In it I have followed the above-mentioned visual and associative approach, by creating acrobatic distributions of visual data intermingled with interviews and critiques. This book is a paper Wunderkammer. The book’s design and visual layout are a revisitation of the concept of spaces in the Wunderkammern. Crammed shelves, bewitching arrangements, objects hanging from the ceiling or piled up along the walls; using specular aesthetics I have populated these pages with crowded illustrations, bizarre colour schemes and frequent palette changes.
The nature of this book precludes any claim to a complete comprehensiveness of the phenomenon, although it does initiate the development of a theory of GeoArt. Actually, my main intent was to wander about the Cabinet of Wonders, trace the diversity of Geologic Art and report the thoughts of geoartists with first-hand interviews. The cultural consciousness of Geologic Art can benefit either art or geology enthusiasts, as well as inspire the creativity of artists. GeoArt is a warm and passionate way to express geology, and its knowledge should be important for those involved in education and the popularization of Earth sciences. For the same reason Geologic Art can be a key instrument for environmental and geologic tourism.

And now, let us open the doors of the Cabinet of Wonders.

Andrea Baucon

The Wunderkammer of Ferrante Imperato.

Botticelli, Pallas and the Centaur. Note layering.