The Linder Gallery » Tycho Brahe

Others See it Yet Otherwise: The Cosmic Systems

michaeljohn — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 21:55:08 +0000

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.

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

Muzio Oddi and the Linder Gallery

Alex — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 16:39:14 +0000

The sole surviving piece of textual evidence that sheds light on the Linder gallery interior is a letter, sent on 28 March 1629, from the architect-engineer Giovanni Battista Caravaggio to his former tutor in mathematics, Mutio Oddi of Urbino. In the letter, Caravaggio (then in Milan) mentions a visit to their friend Pieter Linder, a German merchant who had also studied mathematics with Oddi, and who was the Urbinate scholar’s closest friend. He describes seeing, in Linder’s study, a painting showing a picture gallery in perspective, which is undoubtedly the Linder gallery interior. He then goes on to state that the invenzione (the subject matter) was ‘in large part’ due to Oddi, whose portrait medal is clearly visible on the central, octagonal table. Evidently, Oddi (presumably with input from Linder) orchestrated the picture’s content, transforming a relatively conventional, sketched proposal for the painting (now in the Royal Collection, Windsor Castle) into an elaborate allegory of the relationship between mathematics and disegno, of his friendship with Linder, and of their attitude towards cosmology. In the Linder gallery interior, Oddi presents disegno as a mathematical art, which is based on measurement and calculation – a position that is entirely consistent with the ‘Urbino school’ of mathematicians, to which he belonged. Like other members of this school, such as his own master, Guidobaldo del Monte, Oddi’s approach to cosmology was essentially conservative. Thus, while the ‘motto’ of the painting – Aly et alia vident – may be a plea for toleration in debates about the cosmic systems, we should be alert to its more caustic understones. In his published works, Oddi argued forcefully that the correct way of measuring the heavens was through traditional instruments, such as those scattered on the octagonal table of the painting. Indeed, it is notable that the telescope is conspicuous by its absence from this work, when it is present in other examples of the ‘pictures of collections’ genre. ‘Others may indeed’, Oddi suggests with a note of disdain, ‘see the heavens yet otherwise’, but the way to treat the problem of conflicting cosmic systems was not through the fallible sensory data provided by optical instruments (which relied, as he knew from his experience with mirrors, on an imperfect technology that resulted in imprecise devices), but instead through the certainty that resulted from geometry and with instruments that rest, just as the arts rest on disegno, upon its secure foundations. The books by Kepler on the octagonal table emphasize this point of view, for both (and especially the Tabulae Rudolphinae, which was based on Tycho Brahe’s measurements using traditional instruments) are about geometrical cosmology. Unfortunately, none of Oddi’s or Linder’s correspondence mentions Kepler (so the emphasis we should place on the Imperial Mathematician’s literary presence in the painting must remain speculative), but it is highly likely that both men were sympathetic to his work.