Carvaggio, Galileo, and the artful science of blood spurts: how Galileo’s theory of parabolic motion leads to a new attribution of a 17th-C. painting. From the interview:

We observed that the trajectory of blood spurts is rectilinear in the canvas by Caravaggio (1599), whereas the unknown artist, Louis Finson (ca. 1607), and Artemisia Gentileschi (ca. 1620) painted a parabolic trajectory. In 1604-1608, Galileo Galilei formulated the “theory of projectile motion,” announcing that when an object or particle is thrown near the earth’s surface, it moves along a curved path under the action of gravity. Therefore, when Caravaggio painted his canvas in 1599, the law of projectile motion had yet to be announced, and the painter could not have known about it. Conversely, Finson and Gentileschi could have been familiar with this theory when they depicted their canvases. This could explain the change in the pictorial representation of blood spurts.

h/t Andrew Denoff