Date: June 13, 2009
Title: Tycho Brahe’s Nose
Podcaster: James Clifton
Organization: The Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation and The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston www.mfah.org/blaffer; www.mfah.org
Description: The Danish nobleman, Tycho Brahe (1546-1601), was perhaps the greatest observational astronomer before the advent of the telescope. He had many portraits of himself made, some of which decorated the instruments he designed. This podcast describes some of his portraits and considers how Tycho may have wished to be seen by his contemporaries and by posterity.
Portrait of Tycho Brahe, courtesy Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation.
Bio: Dr. James Clifton is the Director of the Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation and a Curator of Renaissance and Baroque Painting at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, where he has curated “The Body of Christ in the Art of Europe and New Spain, 1150-1800” (1997), as well as two exhibitions of prints from the Collection of the Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation: “A Portrait of the Artist, 1525-1825” (2005); and “The Plains of Mars: European War Prints, 1500-1825” (with Leslie Scattone) (2009). He has published and lectured widely on the art of Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands.
Today’s sponsor: This episode of 365 Days of Astronomy is sponsored by Mark Jones in honor of the Ecumenical Center for Religion and Health, providing counseling services to the children and families of the San Antonio area. Learn more about the Ecumenical Center at ecrh.org.
Transcript:
Hello. This is James Clifton. I’m an art historian at the Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
On an earlier podcast for the “365 Days of Astronomy,” I talked about Galileo and the visual arts. Today my subject is an older contemporary of Galileo, the Danish nobleman Tycho Brahe, who was born in 1546 and died in 1601. Called the Prince of Astronomers and the Prince of Mathematicians by his contemporaries, he made significant contributions especially to practical or observational astronomy, even in this time just before the advent of the telescope. He was important for Johannes Kepler, who worked for Tycho in the last year or so of his life and succeeded him as Imperial Mathematician to the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II in Prague.
I am interested in the way that Tycho was portrayed. I’ve entitled this podcast “Tycho Brahe’s Nose.” Art historians seem to be very interested in the nose. It’s generally the part of the face closest to us in a portrait, and sometimes – as in Tycho’s case – it can be remarkable. There’s a book on Michelangelo’s nose and one on Rembrandt’s nose.
When Tycho was a young man, he lost part of his nose in a duel with broadswords. Duels among the Danish nobility were not at all unusual: several of Tycho’s relatives wounded their opponents, or were wounded, sometimes mortally, in such fights, which were often among family members. Tycho’s fight – with a distant cousin, as it happens – was deemed fair, and there seems to have been no lingering animosity between the combatants. It’s not entirely clear from the sources, but it was probably a chunk in the lower bony part of Tycho’s nose that was chopped out. For the rest of his life he pasted on a prosthetic partial nose, said to be a mixture of gold and silver to approximate flesh colors. When Tycho’s body was exhumed in 1901, discoloration around the wound suggested that copper had been used in the prosthesis, at least at times, and I suppose it’s possible that Tycho had different noses for different occasions. In the elegy at Tycho’s funeral, the speaker made mention of the fight and the nasal loss, which was thought by some to be in poor taste. Tycho’s bitter opponent in astronomical debate, personal accusations, and legal action, a man called Ursus, once insulted Tycho in a book by claiming that he measured the stars not through the sights of an astronomical instrument, but through the three holes of his nose. This was surely thought to be in really poor taste.
The most well-known portrait of Tycho is an engraving from around 1590, printed on paper in black ink, by the Netherlandish artist Jacques De Gheyn. De Gheyn made two versions of the portrait, which differ only slightly; in the earlier one, Tycho’s soft beret sits on the ledge in front of him; in the later one, it sits on Tycho’s head. An irregular and broken line indicates where De Gheyn thought Tycho was missing part of his nose, but the artist never saw the astronomer in person. De Gheyn’s portrait was used in a volume of Tycho’s letters, published in 1595, and in several other contexts, including on a celestial globe based on Tycho’s observations.
I wonder if Tycho’s facial disfiguration was pyschologically disturbing to him, but there’s not much to indicate that it was. I’m not inclined toward psychological interpretations of Renaissance portraits – it’s a very uncertain practice – although Leonardo da Vinci and other artists were explicit that the subtle motions of the face could reveal the emotions of the mind. Portraits serve a lot of purposes – for the sitter, the artist, and the viewer – and making them psychologically penetrating wasn’t usually high on the list of priorities in the Renaissance. For the sitter, a portrait is a self-presentation, the way that he or she wishes to be seen by an audience, whether a very particular audience or the world at large. The portrait’s relation to reality – whether psychological or even physical – can be quite tenuous.
How did Tycho want to be seen? De Gheyn shows him as a typical nobleman, unsmiling, with great mustachios extending over a lace collar. He holds a glove and wears a double gold chain, presented to him by the Danish king, Frederick II, who was so important in funding Tycho’s research. From the chain hang a medallion portrait of the king and a symbol of the Order of the Elephant, granted Tycho for service to the crown, which included casting dependable horoscopes for the royal family. Around him is an arch decorated with sixteen coats-of-arms of his forebears. The inscription describes him not only as Lord of Knudstrup and founder of the castle observatory of Uraniborg on the island of Hven near Copenhagen, where for two decades he pursued his work, but also as the inventor and builder of astronomical instruments.
But in De Gheyn’s portrait of Tycho, nary an instrument appears, and therein lies a certain irony. Recognizing that careful, accurate, and persistent observation, and the instruments required to conduct it, were necessary for the advancement of astronomy, Tycho designed and had constructed many instruments – quadrants, sextants, globes, armillary spheres, and so on – for the measurement, recording, and demonstration of the movements of stars, planets, and comets. In 1598, he had printed a thin folio volume of his instruments, called the Astronimae Instauratae Mechanica (that is, Instruments for the Renovation of Astronomy), generally referred to as the Mechanica, in which he describes and reproduces more than twenty of them. He used this book for self-promotion when he left Denmark and was seeking a patron to support his work elsewhere in Europe.
Tycho was not shy about having himself portrayed and disseminating those portraits. In 1590, for example, he sent De Gheyn’s portrait to a correspondent in Oxford, inquiring if he knew of any poets in England who might write an appropriate epigram for the portrait or in praise of his works.
We can get a sense of his high opinion of himself and his work – mostly justified, to be sure – from a series of large portraits of astronomers and philosophers that he had painted and installed in his observatory. They range from antiquity to the modern age, from Hipparchus and Ptolemy to Copernicus. Tycho composed Latin epigrams in praise of these scientists to go below the portraits. The series also included a portrait of Tycho himself. His epigram suggested that an assessment of his importance must be left to posterity, but by including himself with his illustrious predecessors, the greatest astronomers of all time, Tycho left little doubt as to his own opinion. His portrait showed him pointing up toward the ceiling, on which was painted the Tychonic world system, a geoheliocentric system in which the sun and moon orbit the earth, and all the planets orbit the sun.
Tycho’s instruments were also decorated with portraits, establishing an interesting relationship between human and machine, and also reminding us that instruments could have a symbolic as well as practical function. For example, full-length portraits of Copernicus and Tycho himself, framed by grand classical columns and entablatures, appeared on the base of one of his large armillary spheres that was illustrated in the book on his instruments, the Mechanica.
But the grand-daddy of all such instruments was Tycho’s famous mural quadrant, which was also illustrated in the Mechanica. Built in 1582, it was a solid brass arc with a radius of around two meters, mounted directly on a precisely north-south wall at Uraniborg. Observers aligned the sight of the quadrant with an astronomical body through an opening in the wall opposite. A few years after the quadrant was built, the wall to which it was attached was painted with a life-size figure of Tycho nestled into the great curve of his own instrument. He is seated at a desk, on which lie a few small instruments, and a dog snoozes at his feet, as we might find in a typical Renaissance portrait of a scholar. This painted Tycho points up toward the sighting aperture in the wall. Behind him is depicted a cross-section of the castle, with further assistants and instruments, including alchemical furnaces in the basement. The inscription in the cartouche at top proclaims Tycho the builder of astronomical instruments, a point grandly made evident by the great quadrant itself.
And last, the effigy in marble on Tycho’s tomb slab in Prague shows him once again as a nobleman, his double gold chain around his neck – even wearing armor and holding a sword – but now, fittingly, it also shows his hand resting on a celestial globe that embodies his life’s work.
For this podcast, I have benefited greatly from books on Tycho by John Christianson, Adam Mosley, and Victor Thoren. Even J. L. E. Dreyer’s biography, now more than a century old, can still be read with profit and enjoyment. You can find one of Jacques De Gheyn’s portraits of Tycho on the “365 Days of Astronomy” website.
I leave you with a passage from Tycho’s elegy to Urania, the muse of astronomy, which might be translated from the Latin as: “Happy on earth, happy beyond the heavens, is he who delights in the heavens more than in the earth.”
Thank you for listening.
End of podcast:
365 Days of Astronomy
=====================
The 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast is produced by the New Media Working Group of the International Year of Astronomy 2009. Audio post-production by Preston Gibson. Bandwidth donated by libsyn.com and wizzard media. Web design by Clockwork Active Media Systems. You may reproduce and distribute this audio for non-commercial purposes. Please consider supporting the podcast with a few dollars (or Euros!). Visit us on the web at 365DaysOfAstronomy.org or email us at info@365DaysOfAstronomy.org. Until tomorrow…goodbye.