From Cajal to Dalí and Lorca: the drawings that exposed the substance of the human thoughts and impressed Spanish surrealism | Science | EUROtoday

A former shoemaker’s apprentice, pressured by his father to check Medicine, peered in 1888 right into a tiny world that only a few had contemplated and wherein nobody had seen what he noticed. Santiago Ramón y Cajal, armed with a microscope and rooster cerebellums, found that the nervous system – the substance of thought – was composed of unbiased cells, which communicated with one another by kisses. The 35-year-old researcher was then in a position to apply what was his true ardour as a toddler: portray. He drew these wonderful forests of neurons, with intricate and stylized traces, and ended up profitable the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1906. A brand new documentary now reminds us that the scientist did one thing else. “Consciously or not, Cajal is a founding stone of our surrealism,” artwork historian Jaime Brihuega proclaims within the movie.

The scientist’s life is inconceivable, as he himself recounted in his memoirs. He was born in 1852 in a “sad and humble village”, Petilla de Aragón, right into a household of farmers. Since he was a toddler, Cajal took a pencil, as if it had been a “magic wand,” and secretly drew different worlds, with Greek heroes, apocalyptic landscapes and wars with catapults. His father, who had discovered the commerce of a barber surgeon, hated this interest of portray, which he thought-about typical of lazy folks. Cajal, after fixed paternal beatings, ended up learning Medicine in Zaragoza and, now a professor in Barcelona, ​​found the individuality of the mind cells, the “butterflies of the soul.” The documentary Ramón y Cajal: drawings on the retinawhich opens in theaters on April 9, follows the Nobel Prize winner in Spain and tries to reply a query: How are pictures shaped within the mind?

It is tough to magnify Cajal’s influence on science. “Historians place him alongside Darwin and Pasteur for being one of the greatest biologists of the 19th century, and between Copernicus, Galileo and Newton for being one of the greatest scientists of all time,” says one in all his biographers, the American Benjamin Ehrlich, in The mind looking for itself (Ladera Norte publishing home). The new documentary highlights that Cajal traveled to Sweden to gather the Nobel Prize in December 1906. As quickly as he returned, in January 1907, he took cost of a brand new establishment, the Board of Expansion of Studies, created to advertise scientific analysis in Spain. One of his first measures was the development of the Student Residence in Madrid. There, between 1922 and 1925, the poet Federico García Lorca and the painter Salvador Dalí met.

Jaime Brihuega, professor emeritus of Art History on the Complutense University of Madrid, highlights that “sensational triangle” shaped by Cajal, Lorca and Dalí, “because from there arises, neither more nor less, the birth of Spanish surrealism.” The documentary, directed by Luis Gómez Juanes, confronts two apparently twinned drawings, one in all a human neuron painted by Cajal in 1899 and one other that seems to be by the identical writer, however was executed by Lorca in 1927, on the daybreak of surrealism. “Both Dalí and Lorca begin to use a series of root elements in their drawings. You see all of this in Cajal’s drawings,” explains Brihuega.

In the Student Residence artwork and science coexisted. Pío del Río Hortega, a disciple of Cajal, had his laboratory there. Between them they found three of the 4 basic varieties of mind cells. If Cajal first described neurons in 1888, and the Hungarian anatomist Mihály Lenhossék coined the phrase astrocyte in 1895, to seek advice from different stellate cells that acted as a assist, Del Río Hortega recognized microglia round 1919, chargeable for cleansing waste from the nervous system; and in addition oligodendrocytes, a form of insulating layer of the cables of the neurons. An nameless {photograph}, taken round 1923, reveals Lorca in Pío del Río Hortega’s laboratory, trying by way of a microscope. “He is not a histologist who, after being saturated with emotion in front of a perfect microscopic picture, does not look for someone with a sensitivity similar to his own to show it to him,” wrote Del Río Hortega.

Cajal, half a century older, was not a good friend of both the painter or the poet, however his affect was all over the place. Another of the residents of the Residence was the long run filmmaker Luis Buñuel, who was then learning Natural Sciences and had dissected fly corneas for the scientist. As Benjamin Ehrlich recollects in his biography of the Nobel Prize winner, Buñuel and Dalí offered their brief movie in 1929 An Andalusian caninean icon of surrealism that begins with a scene wherein a person mutilates a girl’s eye with a razor blade. “One of the most indelible images in the history of cinema evokes the sectioning of the cornea of ​​a fly in a Cajal laboratory,” within the phrases of Ehrlich.

The Nobel Prize winner, nonetheless, detested what these younger artists did, like “the deliberate idiocies of Picasso.” in his e book The world seen at eighty years outdatedprinted in 1934, Cajal dedicates a whole chapter to “the degeneration” of the humanities. “During the last twenty-five years, barbarians have invaded us, almost all of them born in France, Germany, Holland and Scandinavia. Disregarding the lessons accumulated by 2,000 years of trials and progress, they have tried to debase our museums and exhibitions with the most absurd and insincere monstrosities,” lamented the scientist. In his opinion, these works carried out in a “schematic and childish” method had been “grotesque.”

Brihuega displays on this paradox within the documentary. “Cajal denied it in a fierce way, but the theme of neurons as the base where everything that surrealism wanted to resurrect is hidden, formally, becomes something fundamental. And that hidden world, those back rooms of consciousness, are what surrealism wanted to open and bring out,” he maintains. A French poet, Louis Aragon, gave a chat on April 18, 1925 on the Student Residence, the place he offered the surrealist motion, which had already been selling the irrational and the dreamlike in France for a 12 months.

An exhibition on the University of Zaragoza, curated by Brihuega himself, already demonstrated in 2015 the visible hyperlinks between Cajal’s drawings and the works of Lorca and Dalí. In 1927 the painter printed a textual content that demonstrated his information of the microscope: “I brought my eye closer to the lens […]. Each drop of water, a number. Every drop of blood, a geometry.” His drawings Beheading of the harmless y The donkey with numbers They resemble constructions of the nervous system. And an oil portray painted by Dalí on the age of 24, Inaugural rooster meat (1928), immediately features a human physique with its nerves uncovered, with letters like these utilized by Cajal in his neurological drawings. Lorca himself baptized the model as “physiological aesthetics.”

The documentary Ramón y Cajal: drawings on the retina It joins an avalanche of tasks carried out on the event of the Cajal Year, declared by the Spanish Government to honor the Nobel Prize winner. Books like Discovering Cajal (GeoPlaneta), by Belén Yuste and Sonnia Rivas-Caballero; Cajal and the emotion of books (CSIC), by José Manuel Sánchez Ron; Cajal and Madrid (Ediciones Cinca), by Javier Sanz; and Santiago Ramón y Cajal. The man, the scientist, the mental (University of Zaragoza), by Alberto Jiménez Schuhmacher and José María Serrano, have recounted completely different aspects of the daddy of neuroscience. The documentary collection Treasures and ghosts of Spanish scienceby the brothers Juan and Paco Pimentel, has additionally devoted a chapter to the Spanish Nobel Prize winner.

The Cajal Year, which ended on May 31, 2025, was going to culminate with the opening of “a museum dedicated to the functioning of the brain,” as introduced by the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, in October 2022. The Ministry of Science proposed finding it within the outdated Faculty of Medicine of Madrid, a mansion from 1834 on Atocha Street the place Cajal conceived his masterpiece: Texture of the nervous system of man and vertebratesthought-about Don Quixote of science. Almost a 12 months after the top of the Cajal Year, the drawings that illuminated the human mind and impressed Spanish surrealism look forward to the promised museum to turn out to be a actuality.