Disegno from the Linder Gallery

It is by no means clear whether the figure of Disegno in the Linder gallery is intended to be generic or a specific portrait.  Michael John has suggested Kepler as a possible candidate – which is certainly plausible, although I have yet to be convinced of the similarity between known portraits of Kepler and the features of the Linder gallery figure, and (frustratingly) there is no evidence that either Oddi or Linder was especially interested in Kepler and his works. An alternative possibility is that the figure of Disegno is in fact modelled on Mutio Oddi’s first tutor in the visual arts, the famous painter Federico Barocci of Urbino.  Barocci’s features, as depicted in his self-portrait of ca. 1600 are close to those of Disegno in the Linder gallery, if we imagine Barocci 20-30 years older (for the gallery was painted in the late 1620s).  Barocci would have been an ideal model for Disegno – he was internationally renowned as a master of design and  was the brother of the celebrated mathematical instrument maker, Simone Barocci, whose works Oddi distributed in Milan to patrons and friends – including Linder.  In fact, as Ian Verstegen has shown in a recent article, Federico used his brother’s instruments (notably the reduction compass) in making his drawings and paintings.  Thus, Barocci could be thought of as a figure for whom mathematics underpinned drawing, and the arts in general.  Oddi – who was exiled from Urbino – was always eager to promote his homeland (indeed, he circulated Barocci drawings in Milan).  What better way of doing this than by incorporating one of its greatest (but recently deceased) artists into the painting he helped to devise?  Just a thought…

Federico Barocci, Self-portrait (ca. 1600)

Cornelis Drebbel's Perpetuum Mobile, detail from Hieronymus Francken the Younger, The Archdukes Albert and Isabella Visiting a Collector's Cabinet, The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore. Compare the shadowy device at no. 43 in the zoomable image of the Linder Gallery

By all accounts, Drebbel’s instrument combined two features, first, a self-winding astronomical almanac showing the date and the phases of the moon, and second, a cylindrical ring in which water moved endlessly to and fro. Even if the Perpetuum Mobile was only a simple air thermoscope (relying on temperature changes), or at best a crude baroscope (subject to changes in air pressure), Drebbel invested it with great mystery and great value, and saw it as a confirmation of the principles he elaborated in his Ein Kurßer Tractat von der Natur Der Elementen first published in 1608. Although clearly his claim was unfounded, perhaps we at least to try to understand what he thought he was doing when he speaks of the instrument’s secret as ‘the fiery spirit of the air’. Perhaps the glass cylinder was filled not with mere air, but with oxygen produced by heating saltpetre, or nitre, which Drebbel was convinced held the secret to chemical transformations of many kinds. As Jennifer Drake-Brockman astutely observes, Drebbel stands on the threshold between two ways of looking at the natural world. As she writes ‘On the one hand, were those philosophers, including Drebbel himself, who explained the machine in mystical or alchemical terms, and whose mind-set might be described as the Rosicrucian tendency; their thinking was ultimately grounded in the Aristotelian universe, the building blocks of which were the four elements. On the other hand, were the exponents of the scientific tendency, whose efforts were directed towards an understanding of observed physical phenomena and to whom the Aristotelian worldview was increasingly an irrelevance; […]’. Drebbel’s alchemy was indeed Aristotelian, and he accorded nitre a special significance as part of Paracelsus’s tria prima of Mercury, Sulfur and Salt, hence his experiments with cooling, underwater travel, explosives and of course, the Perpetuum Mobile.