Before anybody knew Mandelbrot, artists were seeing fractals in nature and transfered the patterns in painting, design and sculpture. Fractals, as you know, are geometric patterns that are repeated on smaller and smaller scales to produce intricate designs outside the scope of classical geometry. They are described by a Mandelbrot equation.

The mind has always had a fixation with recursive and fractal patterns,
largely because our environment is filled with them. Only in the last 40 years
have we been able to finally describe this exquisitely subtle math of interacting patterns. Fractals may have become a cliche in modern computer graphics, but they have a long and rich history in art:

Medieval Celtic Book of Kells (597 A.D.):




This cultural treasure contains every variety of design typical of Irish art at its best. The most characteristic ornaments of the Book of Kells, as of other illuminated Irish manuscripts of the period, are the closely coiled spirals connected with each other by a number of curves and terminating in the so-called "trumpet fractal pattern".

Judaic tradition:



Hindu tradition: