A delight of a bookLift-EMV
He has done it again. José Miguel Viñas has written the book that one would have liked to publish. And he has done it with his usual rigor and attention to detail. And I am especially happy that “The Skies Portrayed” is the new contribution to the knowledge of weather and climate, to the dissemination of culture in a broad sense, by my admired José Miguel Viñas. I know that in this book he has used effort and time to be able to offer a result as brilliant scientifically and as beautiful formally as the one he has given us in this essay. It is a journey through the meteorological and climatic disciplines through universal painting, through the great masters who have left us beautiful scenes of skies, clouds, storms, rain, fog, snow, sun or lightning in their paintings. José Miguel takes an exhaustive tour through the different periods and the painters who are representative of him. And he teaches us to look at the skies in those paintings that we contemplate in museums without realizing that in the background of those canvases moments of atmospheric dynamics are concentrated. In the sky of the painting “The Surrender of Breda” by Velázquez there is a lesson on cloud types better explained than in a treatise on climatology. And so also in some paintings by Turner, Goya, Patinir, Brueghel the Elder, Friedrich, Van Gogh, Constable and many others. The cloud, the sky that accompanies a pictorial scene is not a simple aesthetic artifice or the artist’s excuse to compensate for the horror vacui of a canvas. These backgrounds require study and have their meaning, even if only as a snapshot of a specific moment portrayed. José Miguel Viñas teaches us all this in his new book. A history of art through meteorology. I admit it, he’s ahead of us. He published it before anyone else and it is going to be a bestseller. There is no choice but to buy it and enjoy it. It is not a mandate, it is an emphatic recommendation. “The Heavens Portrayed” is a wonderful essay that comes from the best current popularizer of the weather and climate in our country: José Miguel Viñas. Congratulations. What a pleasure to read and learn from you.
