After the interest of the eighteenth-century romantic poets, literature inspired by crystals underwent a boom in the nineteenth century. Science-fiction masterpieces were written, like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, based on electro-crystallization experiments, or Voyage dans le cristal by the imaginative George Sand; but above all it was Jules Verne who masterfully described an unforgettable scene of giant crystals in his famous book, Journey to the Centre of the Earth.
The supposed existence of those great crystals was taken up again in the first half of the twentieth century in comics, in radio and television shows, and in cinema. Undoubtedly the most famous story related to the prodigious power of crystals is that of Superman, in which the crystals from Krypton, his fictitious planet of origin, plays a central role.
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The belief in two worlds of opposing symmetries has pervaded the landscape of the arts and philosophy for centuries. On one hand the mineral world, dominated by the straight line, the cold, periodic and repetitive order of crystals, which is associated with rationality, intelligence, power; on the other hand, the world of life, dominated by the rich symmetry of the curve and ramification, the world of sensuality and passion. Crystallography has played an important role in the intellectual construction of this aesthetic debate.
The article “Towards the Crystal” written by Amédée Ozenfant y Charles Jeanneret (Le Corbusier) in the journal L’Esprit Nouveau in 1924 is a manifesto of purism, a continuation of cubism. As in the building of the journal itself, the Pavillon de l’Esprit Nouveau, designed by Le Corbusier, the power of the straight line was reclaimed, simple shapes liberated from the decorative, and aesthetic value from the machine. Ultimately, it was a manifesto for the purity and exactitude of the crystal. These ideas implacably dominated the architecture of the twentieth century.
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The aesthetic debate between the straight line and the curve, between art as a tool of knowledge and art as passion, is shown in all its profundity in the personal history of two young artists: Federico García-Lorca and Salvador Dalí. The Ode to Salvador Dalí written by Lorca is a perfect example of this debate between the crystalline, represented by the young Dalí influenced by the ideas of purism, and the curvy and complex rose preferred by the Andalusian poet. In Poeta en Nueva York, written between 1929 and 1930, the poet still maintained his posture – “always the rose” – in the first verse of the poem that opens the book:
Murdered by the sky,
between the forms that go toward the snake
and the forms searching for crystal,
I will let my hair grow.
The monolith of 2001: A Space Odyssey, the film by Stanley Kubrick based on a 1948 short story by Arthur C. Clarke, represents a superior intelligence, whether God or an alien civilization. Its form could not be anything other than that of a crystalline polyhedron.
Playing her parchment moon
Preciosa comes
along a watery way
of crystals and laurels.
If you love films, you can check out a teaching guide of Crystallography in cinema.
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