Merging Science and Art through Fungi

Science and art have long been studied interchangeably, with notable polymaths emerging in the Renaissance such as Leonardo da Vinci (artist, inventor, engineer and anatomist) and Alexander von Humboldt (explorer, geographer and naturalist) with his fellow investigators Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (scientist and writer) and Friedrich Schiller (philosopher, physician and historian). However, this polymathic attitude and the co-operation between scientists and artists seemed to go into hibernation in the second half of the eighteenth century due to an overload of information, especially for the scientists. I illustrate here that the two seemingly diverse fields can feed and sustain each other not only from the attitude of how to think about an object, but also how to show this object in a way that may not have been seen before. Ideas and viewpoints gained from looking at an organism artistically can enable a scientist to think “outside the box”, providing insights to reassess earlier scientifcally hidebound attitudes.