Connections/Magic

My name is Marco Leona. I am the chief scientist here at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and my topic is "Magic."

I grew up in Italy and magic is something that one would hear going out in the countryside and hearing about witches

and curses and legends. And science came in as a part of that. I'm not afraid to tell you that I had a

science chemistry box and made all kinds of stinking and staining and corrosive mixtures, many more than you can actually do today. And if it was not in the kit I supplemented it very quickly with all kinds of other stuff.

And that's magic that you have in your hand, right? You can make it there. Suddenly it's smoking; suddenly it's foaming; suddenly it has color. So, you sort of feel empowered.

Magic is traditionally about transformation: taking something that's baser

less refined, less valuable

and making it into something resplendent. If you look at a

sculptor's workshop from ancient Greece, you see a statue in the process of being finished. All sculpture was polychrome, it was painted in a naturalistic way. And so

we see that half of the statue's still white, the color of marble; there's a painter who is now making it lifelike.

The painter and the statue are not alone in their studio. The artist is assisted by the gods, so is part of a supernatural endeavor. He's performing magic.

Magic is what people in ages past used to call things they didn't understand. There are many things that we don't understand now, that we no longer call magic.

Very few people could explain how electric lights work, and we just decided that we don't call it magic, we know that it's science.

There's a wonderful frieze tile from twelfth century Iran, from a location called Takht-i Sulayman. The Persian artists went through a process of trial and error and logical deduction, trying to achieve something similar to porcelain from China.

Using their knowledge of glass technology, and through a very complicated firing procedure, they developed a technique to create gold, copper, or silver nanoparticles dispersed in glass layers.

And that interaction gives rise to green-yellow reflection. It's very complicated science that was understood in a functional way.

On anybody other than the person doing it and those in on the secret, this would have appeared like something absolutely magic.

The Great Wave by Hokusai, probably one of the most reproduced works of art in the world. What is so incredible about this piece of art, which everybody would say is quintessential Japanese art, is that, in fact

the deep blue in the wave that really gives us a sense of the ocean is Prussian blue, which had been discovered in Berlin in 1704. Without that blue, that print could not have been done.

When these prints appeared, because blue is associated with perception of depth and space, it's like a 3-D movie for us, it's like television. They changed the way of seeing, in a sense.

If you think about it, people like me a thousand years ago, were walking a very thin line, because

the powers that you had in creating things that were not known to the general population, not even to the powerful, were scary. Call them what you want—

artists, scientists, technologists, alchemists—were behind all of the objects you see at the museum.

Kapoor is playing some kind of magic. It's really a bag of tricks. It's a spherical mirror, it uses the same technology that's used in telescopes today, but

because of the way the image is returned to you—magnified, inverted, changing as you walk

in and out of its focus—it really engages you in a very physical, direct way. We are transformed, transfixed. So

magic is still possible.