At the front of the green octagonal table in the Linder Gallery, very prominently positioned in the painting, is a scrap of paper bearing three competing systems of the universe: the Ptolemaic earth-centred system at the top left, the sun-centred Copernican system (prohibited by the Inquisition since 1616) and the compromise system of the Danish astronomer, Kepler’s mentor Tycho Brahe, which has the inner planets going around the sun but the sun and the outer planets orbiting around the earth. Read more…

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)

The Perpetuum Mobile, a machine which can just be made out in the shadowy right background of the Linder Gallery (no. 43 in the zoomable image), is not the only invention of Cornelis Drebbel (1572-1633), nor perhaps even the most significant, but it is certainly the one for which he was best known by his contemporaries, and the one of which he remained most proud. It is also the instrument about which most has been written – both by his contemporaries and by modern scholars. First demonstrated in late 1604, the fame of Drebbel and his Perpetuum Mobile spread rapidly, and the Perpetuum Mobile was still being cited as late as the 19^th century, long after Drebbel himself had passed into obscurity. Read more…

The foreground of the Linder Gallery is dominated by two figures, a bearded old man and a young woman in classical clothing reclining in his lap. Whereas the male figure appears to be a portrait, the female figure seems to be purely allegorical. The paintbrushes, maulstick and artist’s pallete would suggest that she can be identified as Painting, or perhaps more broadly as the Arts, given that she is also holding a sculptor’s mallet. Read more…

There is an intriguing letter in the university library of Urbino recently uncovered by Alexander Marr that provides a direct eyewitness account of the Linder Gallery from shortly after its creation. It was sent in March 1629 by an engineer, Giovanni Battista Caravaggio to his mathematical  tutor, Mutio Oddi, describing a visit to the house of the German merchant Peter Linder. Read more…