Dana Winner - House Of Cards

Once scientists come up with grand castles of ideas, they face the challenge of building their castles or realizing their ideas in such a way that they do not collapse and fall to the ground like a house of cards. This is where the work of the 18th century French artist Jean-Siméon Chardin (1699-1779) can be instructive to scientists. One of the most revered of French painters, Chardin was a master of intimate genre scenes in which he captured on the canvas one or two figures from the Parisian middle class engaged in work or play (Prigent and Rosenberg, 2000). Among his most admired works is a suite of four paintings entitled House of Cards, which were painted from 1735 to 1737 (Carey, 2012). In the first of the four paintings, a young boy is shown deeply absorbed in the tricky art of adding the Ace of Hearts to a fragile castle-like structure constructed from four or five other cards (Figure 3). If the placement of the Ace card is not balanced perfectly, the whole structure topples over with all the cards falling flat on the table.

Dana Winner - House Of Cards

041b061a72