Three conversing figures, detail from Windsor drawing

Gorman: I suppose a fundamental question remains: what is the relationship between this drawing and this painting? Because the drawing, I think, clearly is before the painting. You know, these are sketches and so on, and it’s clearly very closely related to the picture — it doesn’t seem to be a completely independent work. But the drawing, as you can see, is more conventional — it has the same octagonal table, it has the globe, but it has the more conventional picture of three connoisseurs conversing around a table, it has a dog — it is more in the traditional genre of gallery interiors.

Cordover: And I would argue that two of those cognoscenti are easily identifiable.

Marr: Yes.

Cordover: I think that the figure on the right is almost identical to a self portrait by Peter Paul Rubens.

Marr: Yes, I would say that.

Cordover: And the figure on the left I think is also identifiable . . . .

Gorman: As Peter Linder?

Marr: Yes I think it is Peter Linder.

Cordover: Do you think so?

Gorman: Yes. And I also have a guess about who the figure in the middle is.

Cordover: That’s extraordinary.

Gorman: I saw it this afternoon. I think it’s Van Dyck, who was working in the Rubens studio from 1618 to 1620.

Cordover: Now that you’ve said it, it conjures up that portrait of Van Dyck that does look just like this.

Gorman: But if it is van Dyck, think about the drawing, — I think the drawing is memorializing a visit.  Perhaps Linder went to Antwerp for business between 1618 and 1620, and this was a visit where he met Rubens and van Dyck, and this is where the idea of him commissioning a gallery painting originated, and then this drawing was developed, possibly brought by Jan Brueghel the Younger to Milan. Then Linder and Oddi developed a more complex version of the composition and brought in the allegory, the deep mathematical content and the Kepler connection and so on and then that led to the painting. It’s just an idea.

Cordover: Van Dyck went to Milan with Jan Brueghel the Younger, his close friend, in 1622.

Weschler: The painting is painted in Antwerp or in Milan?

Gorman: The painting could have been painted in theory in either, but it was definitely painted by an Antwerp painter and they didn’t tend to stick around in Milan for long enough to do much, so it seems more likely that it was painted in Antwerp but commissioned perhaps on the basis of a visit to Milan.

Weschler: How could they have worked from Milan? There are the Alps in between…

Here’s an excerpt from an email I received about this a couple of days ago:

I should probably start out by asking if you watch LOST? The TV show is finishing up in 2010, it’s 6th and final season. In the hiatus, there has been a viral marketing campaign of sorts atDamonCarltonAndAPolarBear.com involving the release of a series of 16 graphic art screen prints, about once a week. Each print release is preceded by a series of clues that tell eventually tell us where/when to be at a particular real world venue or internet site where a web URL is released. The URL once released is the only place to buy the print. There are less than 200 of each of these prints made available and the viral marketing has attracted so much attention that each of the last few prints has sold out in 2 minutes or less. We just had the latest print release on Thursday, Novemeber 12th. The series of clues we were given lead to SPiN NYC, a table tennis night club in New York from 6-8PM. This particular reveal occurred through a short video. Fans at SPiN were shown a short video, and the URL we needed was flashed very quickly at the end . As an added bonus, there were 6 images “buried” in the last couple seconds of the video, that are supposed to be hints/teasers to the upcoming final season of LOST. The Linder Gallery Interior painting was the 2nd of these images …. Thanks for your reply! LOST fans await your input. LOST can also be said to lie “at the intersection of art, science and mystery”.

 

Are there any LOST fans out there who know anything more about this?

The three cosmic systems: Ptolemaic, Copernican and Tychonic with the inscription ALY ET ALIA VIDENT

At the base of this piece of paper in tiny but very precise writing are the Latin words “ALY ET ALIA VIDENT” meaning “Others see it yet otherwise”, suggesting that the three systems presented here are not exhaustive. Could this be a reference to Johannes Kepler who proposed that the planets orbit the sun in elliptical paths, did not believe Tycho’s system was physically plausible and abandoned Copernicus’s solid crystalline spheres? Behind the diagram of the cosmic systems is an astrological geniture for an as yet unidentified person born in the month of March. Perhaps the artist is suggesting the extremely close link between astronomy and astrology in the seventeenth century –  Tycho Brahe and Kepler both earned income from casting horoscopes.

It is interesting that ALY ET ALIA VIDENT is such a central phrase to the painting, almost like a caption — Others see it yet otherwise — the universe is amenable to different forms of interpretation. This is a strikingly casual stance for the period just a few years prior to Galileo’s Inquisition trial for Copernicanism. References to Galileo’s telescopic discoveries, incidentally, are surprisingly absent from the Linder Gallery, here we seem to be much more in the realm of precision measurement.

ALY ET ALIA VIDENT. What is behind this intriguing phrase? Could it be an oblique reference to Kepler? Or is it just a lack of cosmic committment? Given its prominence in the painting, could it be a suggestion that the painting itself is open to radically different forms of interpretation, or is that just a 21st century way of reading too much into a scrap of painted paper?

Again, this drawing seems to relate to the frontispiece of Kepler’s Rudolphine Tables, the book present on the green table, where we behold the Temple of Urania, muse of astronomy, inhabited by great astronomers of the past. Tycho Brahe points at the ceiling which is marked with his own cosmic system, asking the words “Quid si sic?” — “What if it is like that?”. Kepler himself is not included in the temple but sits in the base, looking at an architect’s model as the “humble” architect of a new edifice of astronomy. Another puzzle: given that the painting is all about measurement, geometry and perspective and their relationship with the arts, why is the perspective of the octagonal green table itself so wonky, apparently tilting forward?

Temple of Urania, Georg Celer's frontispiece for the Rudolphine Tables