- Email: [email protected]
Claiming Copernicus
Review
Endeavour
Vol.29 No.4 December 2005
Claiming Copernicus Patricia Fara Clare College, Cambridge, UK CB2 1TL
The reputations of scientific heroes shift constantly, modified by politicians as well as by historians. Now that the Scientific Revolution has been reappraised, Nicolas Copernicus is portrayed as a friend of the Catholic Church rather than a scientific martyr. As a German-speaking Pole he has been claimed as a figure of national historical importance by both Germany and Poland, and since the early 20th century has been an important symbol of Polish independence. In his 1939 play The Life of Galileo, Bertolt Brecht dramatically portrayed a head-on conflict between Galileo’s science and the Catholic Church in order to castigate Nazi policies. He recognized that – like national rulers – scientists promote their activities by creating heroes: ANDREA: Unhappy the land that has no heroes!. GALILEO: No. Unhappy the land that needs heroes. [1] Another candidate for the role of scientific martyr could have been Nicolas Copernicus (1473–1543), equally familiar to Brecht’s German audiences although more contentious. Chauvinistic German scholars had long been arguing about Copernicus’ nationality, but after Poland regained its independence in 1920 the Poles celebrated MikoŁaj Kopernik – Copernicus – as a Polish iconic figurehead. However, when a set of stamps commemorating the anniversary of Copernicus’ death was produced during the German occupation of Poland in World War II, it carried a border of swastikas and used the spelling of his name stipulated by Adolf Hitler – Nikolaus Kopernikus [2]. Historians as well as politicians have debated Copernicus’ heroic status. In old-fashioned accounts, he features as the revolutionary astronomer who broke the shackles of Aristotelianism and placed the Sun rather than the Earth at the centre of the universe. More timid than Galileo, he avoided challenging biblical authority by hiding behind Andreas Osiander’s unsigned letter, which formed a preface disguising Copernicus’ radical model of the cosmos as a mere hypothesis. Such simplistic eulogies have been revised several times, and – as with Galileo – the confrontations between Copernicus and the religious establishment have been more carefully painted. Currently Copernicus is presented as a diplomatic Church functionary, a learned and artistic humanist: rather than being terrified of the Pope’s fury, Copernicus sought his patronage as he endeavoured to persuade the Church authorities that his own ideas were right [3]. The anonymous devotional portrait shown in Figure 1 provides supporting evidence for this subtler interpretation. Possibly based on a self-portrait, it was painted for Corresponding author: Fara, P. ([email protected]). Available online 4 November 2005
the church at Torun´, Copernicus’ birthplace, 40 years after his death, and it shows Copernicus the Christian rather than Copernicus the Cosmologist. The metal dividers and armillary sphere on the shelf behind his head are the traditional tools of an intellectual astronomer. However, the sombre signs of mortality – the wooden crucifix and the skull – are far more prominent, and are emphasized still further by the contrast with his scarlet jerkin. The Latin verse, which may have been chosen by Copernicus as his own epitaph, is one of 34 odes on Christ’s suffering written by the future Pope Pius II: Not grace the equal of Paul’s do I ask, Nor Peter’s pardon seek, but what To a thief you granted on the wood of the cross, This I do earnestly pray. Other artists copied this portrait, and a century later a modified black and white version appeared depicting Copernicus in a very different context – Christopher Hartnoch’s Alt und Neues Preussen (Prussia Old and New) . The Latin title of the image identifies Copernicus as a distinguished Prussian mathematician, and he has been appropriately transformed into an older scholar with bushy hair – no sign here of the skull and gloomy landscape. This altered copy is interesting because it influenced subsequent depictions of Copernicus, which share the way in which they reverse the original, as if the Torun´ portrait had been reflected in a mirror. This effect occurs during printing if the engraver copies a picture directly on to the plate [4]. In 1943, Polish exiles in the USA organized worldwide celebrations to commemorate a double 400th anniversary – that of Copernicus’ death and the publication of his De Revolutionibus Orbium Cœlestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres). To help advertise their programmes they recruited Arthur Szyk, a refugee artist who specialized in the techniques of illuminating mediaeval manuscripts, to produce the bright miniature in Figure 2. It is packed with Polish symbolism. The national colours of red and white dominate the lower part, where the royal eagle wears a crown to indicate that Poland was free during Copernicus’s lifetime. At the top left Wawel castle and cathedral sit on a hill above Krako´w, the town where Copernicus attended university and which was the capital of Poland in his era. The university coat-of-arms is on the right, accompanied by the date of its foundation (1364) and renovation (1400). This portrait provided Polish political propaganda during World War II. Although his face is similar to the reversed copy of Figure 1, Copernicus (no Hitlerian Ks in the Latin form Copernicus used himself) is now richly clothed, sporting the formal chain and fur-trimmed cap of a Polish academic. Echoing the religious imagery
www.sciencedirect.com 0160-9327/$ - see front matter Q 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.endeavour.2005.08.002
Review
Endeavour Vol.29 No.4 December 2005
Figure 1. A Christian Copernicus. This epitaph to Copernicus was painted in 1948 by Jerzy Hoppen, and is a copy of an anonymous devotional portrait in St John’s Church, Torun´, Poland (circa 1583). Image supplied by, and reproduced with permission from, the Nicolas Copernicus Museum in Frombork, MF/M/8.
149
contained in the earlier portrait, Copernicus holds up a miniature model of a planet orbiting around the sun and clasps his astronomical dividers. The lantern at the front left resembles those Copernicus used in his observation tower at night, but it also plays on metaphors of the sun as a god or king radiating glory and bestowing the light of understanding. On the table, a copy of the Bible is overwhelmed by the famous golden globe that belonged to the Jagiellonian royal family. Driven by clockwork, the Jagiellonian globe was the first such model of the solar system constructed along Copernican lines. In the detail that Szyk included on the surface of the globe, the artistic patriot who had fled to New York has identified only one continent – ‘America, the newly discovered land’. On the Latin scrolls at the bottom right, the lower one says ‘He told the sun to stop and the earth to spin. He was a Pole’. This is an ingenious transformation of the savage Latin comments made in the 16th century by Philip Melanchthon. Denigrating Copernicus as a member of the Sarmatians, an Iranian nomadic tribe from which Slavs were reputed to descend, Melanchthon accused him of foolishly wishing that the sun would stay still (in Latin, there are crucial differences in meaning between movet/ movit and figit/fixit). Propped up behind the lantern, a planetary diagram is headed ‘Copernicus died, but science was born’; visible on the curled-up reverse side of the diagram is the Polish equivalent of the Latin tribute on the right [5]. Science is supposedly an international enterprise, but – as Brecht realized – local heroes have often been co-opted to serve political ends. During the 19th century, artists abandoned attempts to portray Carl Linnaeus realistically as a small, dark man, and instead converted him into a Nordic icon with blond hair and blue eyes [6]. Similarly, post-war Britain declared its independence of America by hailing Alexander Fleming as the lone discoverer of penicillin: this Scottish scientist was depicted as the successor of Caractatus, the first-century Catuvellaunian king who repelled the Romans, and also of Francis Drake, the English naval commander who defeated the Spanish Armada [7]. Now that Poland is no longer under either German or Russian rule it continues to reclaim its own famous figureheads, including scientific icons such as MikoŁaj Kopernik and Manya SkŁodowska (Marie Curie). References
Figure 2. A Polish Copernicus. Coloured miniature by Arthur Szyk, 1943; q The Kosciuszko Foundation, an American centre for Polish Culture. www.sciencedirect.com
1 From scene 13 in Brecht’s 1939 play The Life of Galileo, as quoted in Knowles, E., ed. (1999) The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, Oxford University Press (Oxford, UK), p. 149 2 Gingerich, O. (1999) The Copernican Quinquecentennial and its Predecessors: Historical Insights and National Agendas. Osiris 14, 37–60 3 Westman, R.S. (1990) Proof, Poetics, and Patronage: Copernicus’s Preface to De Revolutionibus. In Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution (Lindberg, D.C. and Westman, R.S., eds), pp. 167–205, Cambridge University Press (Cambridge, UK) 4 The poem and picture are reproduced in Westman, R.S. (1990), pp. 192– 194 5 Mizwa, S.P. (1943) Nicholas Copernicus: A Tribute of the Nations, Kosciusko Foundation (New York, NY, USA), (Szyk’s picture was on the cover) 6 Koerner, L. (1999) Linnaeus: Nature and Nation, Harvard University Press, pp. 181–182 7 Bud, R. (1998) Penicillin and the New Elizabethans. British Journal for the History of Science 31, 305–333
Endeavour
Vol.29 No.4 December 2005
Claiming Copernicus Patricia Fara Clare College, Cambridge, UK CB2 1TL
The reputations of scientific heroes shift constantly, modified by politicians as well as by historians. Now that the Scientific Revolution has been reappraised, Nicolas Copernicus is portrayed as a friend of the Catholic Church rather than a scientific martyr. As a German-speaking Pole he has been claimed as a figure of national historical importance by both Germany and Poland, and since the early 20th century has been an important symbol of Polish independence. In his 1939 play The Life of Galileo, Bertolt Brecht dramatically portrayed a head-on conflict between Galileo’s science and the Catholic Church in order to castigate Nazi policies. He recognized that – like national rulers – scientists promote their activities by creating heroes: ANDREA: Unhappy the land that has no heroes!. GALILEO: No. Unhappy the land that needs heroes. [1] Another candidate for the role of scientific martyr could have been Nicolas Copernicus (1473–1543), equally familiar to Brecht’s German audiences although more contentious. Chauvinistic German scholars had long been arguing about Copernicus’ nationality, but after Poland regained its independence in 1920 the Poles celebrated MikoŁaj Kopernik – Copernicus – as a Polish iconic figurehead. However, when a set of stamps commemorating the anniversary of Copernicus’ death was produced during the German occupation of Poland in World War II, it carried a border of swastikas and used the spelling of his name stipulated by Adolf Hitler – Nikolaus Kopernikus [2]. Historians as well as politicians have debated Copernicus’ heroic status. In old-fashioned accounts, he features as the revolutionary astronomer who broke the shackles of Aristotelianism and placed the Sun rather than the Earth at the centre of the universe. More timid than Galileo, he avoided challenging biblical authority by hiding behind Andreas Osiander’s unsigned letter, which formed a preface disguising Copernicus’ radical model of the cosmos as a mere hypothesis. Such simplistic eulogies have been revised several times, and – as with Galileo – the confrontations between Copernicus and the religious establishment have been more carefully painted. Currently Copernicus is presented as a diplomatic Church functionary, a learned and artistic humanist: rather than being terrified of the Pope’s fury, Copernicus sought his patronage as he endeavoured to persuade the Church authorities that his own ideas were right [3]. The anonymous devotional portrait shown in Figure 1 provides supporting evidence for this subtler interpretation. Possibly based on a self-portrait, it was painted for Corresponding author: Fara, P. ([email protected]). Available online 4 November 2005
the church at Torun´, Copernicus’ birthplace, 40 years after his death, and it shows Copernicus the Christian rather than Copernicus the Cosmologist. The metal dividers and armillary sphere on the shelf behind his head are the traditional tools of an intellectual astronomer. However, the sombre signs of mortality – the wooden crucifix and the skull – are far more prominent, and are emphasized still further by the contrast with his scarlet jerkin. The Latin verse, which may have been chosen by Copernicus as his own epitaph, is one of 34 odes on Christ’s suffering written by the future Pope Pius II: Not grace the equal of Paul’s do I ask, Nor Peter’s pardon seek, but what To a thief you granted on the wood of the cross, This I do earnestly pray. Other artists copied this portrait, and a century later a modified black and white version appeared depicting Copernicus in a very different context – Christopher Hartnoch’s Alt und Neues Preussen (Prussia Old and New) . The Latin title of the image identifies Copernicus as a distinguished Prussian mathematician, and he has been appropriately transformed into an older scholar with bushy hair – no sign here of the skull and gloomy landscape. This altered copy is interesting because it influenced subsequent depictions of Copernicus, which share the way in which they reverse the original, as if the Torun´ portrait had been reflected in a mirror. This effect occurs during printing if the engraver copies a picture directly on to the plate [4]. In 1943, Polish exiles in the USA organized worldwide celebrations to commemorate a double 400th anniversary – that of Copernicus’ death and the publication of his De Revolutionibus Orbium Cœlestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres). To help advertise their programmes they recruited Arthur Szyk, a refugee artist who specialized in the techniques of illuminating mediaeval manuscripts, to produce the bright miniature in Figure 2. It is packed with Polish symbolism. The national colours of red and white dominate the lower part, where the royal eagle wears a crown to indicate that Poland was free during Copernicus’s lifetime. At the top left Wawel castle and cathedral sit on a hill above Krako´w, the town where Copernicus attended university and which was the capital of Poland in his era. The university coat-of-arms is on the right, accompanied by the date of its foundation (1364) and renovation (1400). This portrait provided Polish political propaganda during World War II. Although his face is similar to the reversed copy of Figure 1, Copernicus (no Hitlerian Ks in the Latin form Copernicus used himself) is now richly clothed, sporting the formal chain and fur-trimmed cap of a Polish academic. Echoing the religious imagery
www.sciencedirect.com 0160-9327/$ - see front matter Q 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.endeavour.2005.08.002
Review
Endeavour Vol.29 No.4 December 2005
Figure 1. A Christian Copernicus. This epitaph to Copernicus was painted in 1948 by Jerzy Hoppen, and is a copy of an anonymous devotional portrait in St John’s Church, Torun´, Poland (circa 1583). Image supplied by, and reproduced with permission from, the Nicolas Copernicus Museum in Frombork, MF/M/8.
149
contained in the earlier portrait, Copernicus holds up a miniature model of a planet orbiting around the sun and clasps his astronomical dividers. The lantern at the front left resembles those Copernicus used in his observation tower at night, but it also plays on metaphors of the sun as a god or king radiating glory and bestowing the light of understanding. On the table, a copy of the Bible is overwhelmed by the famous golden globe that belonged to the Jagiellonian royal family. Driven by clockwork, the Jagiellonian globe was the first such model of the solar system constructed along Copernican lines. In the detail that Szyk included on the surface of the globe, the artistic patriot who had fled to New York has identified only one continent – ‘America, the newly discovered land’. On the Latin scrolls at the bottom right, the lower one says ‘He told the sun to stop and the earth to spin. He was a Pole’. This is an ingenious transformation of the savage Latin comments made in the 16th century by Philip Melanchthon. Denigrating Copernicus as a member of the Sarmatians, an Iranian nomadic tribe from which Slavs were reputed to descend, Melanchthon accused him of foolishly wishing that the sun would stay still (in Latin, there are crucial differences in meaning between movet/ movit and figit/fixit). Propped up behind the lantern, a planetary diagram is headed ‘Copernicus died, but science was born’; visible on the curled-up reverse side of the diagram is the Polish equivalent of the Latin tribute on the right [5]. Science is supposedly an international enterprise, but – as Brecht realized – local heroes have often been co-opted to serve political ends. During the 19th century, artists abandoned attempts to portray Carl Linnaeus realistically as a small, dark man, and instead converted him into a Nordic icon with blond hair and blue eyes [6]. Similarly, post-war Britain declared its independence of America by hailing Alexander Fleming as the lone discoverer of penicillin: this Scottish scientist was depicted as the successor of Caractatus, the first-century Catuvellaunian king who repelled the Romans, and also of Francis Drake, the English naval commander who defeated the Spanish Armada [7]. Now that Poland is no longer under either German or Russian rule it continues to reclaim its own famous figureheads, including scientific icons such as MikoŁaj Kopernik and Manya SkŁodowska (Marie Curie). References
Figure 2. A Polish Copernicus. Coloured miniature by Arthur Szyk, 1943; q The Kosciuszko Foundation, an American centre for Polish Culture. www.sciencedirect.com
1 From scene 13 in Brecht’s 1939 play The Life of Galileo, as quoted in Knowles, E., ed. (1999) The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, Oxford University Press (Oxford, UK), p. 149 2 Gingerich, O. (1999) The Copernican Quinquecentennial and its Predecessors: Historical Insights and National Agendas. Osiris 14, 37–60 3 Westman, R.S. (1990) Proof, Poetics, and Patronage: Copernicus’s Preface to De Revolutionibus. In Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution (Lindberg, D.C. and Westman, R.S., eds), pp. 167–205, Cambridge University Press (Cambridge, UK) 4 The poem and picture are reproduced in Westman, R.S. (1990), pp. 192– 194 5 Mizwa, S.P. (1943) Nicholas Copernicus: A Tribute of the Nations, Kosciusko Foundation (New York, NY, USA), (Szyk’s picture was on the cover) 6 Koerner, L. (1999) Linnaeus: Nature and Nation, Harvard University Press, pp. 181–182 7 Bud, R. (1998) Penicillin and the New Elizabethans. British Journal for the History of Science 31, 305–333