Picturing the Scientific Revolution (review)

This volume, a translation of the German text Widmung, Welterklaerung, und Wissenschaftslegitimierung (Wiesbaden, 2005) brings to English readers the opportunity of understanding more fully the role of frontispieces, engravings, and visual emblems in the development of astronomy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Like the texts and images that are Volker R. Remmert’s historical subject, the author provides a kind of explanatio imaginum that brings out the contextual meanings implied in the pictures he examines. The book is handsomely constructed and well annotated with numerous references to historical sources and secondary interpretations drawn from the ranks of historians of science and art. However, Remmert clearly emerges as a historian of science in that his book’s organization is not so much around the images as much it is around the ideas inscribed in the images. He contextualizes the images, not in an artistic tradition, but in the debates around Copernicanism and the attempt to gain support for both science and the theory itself. As the German title suggests, Remmert shows the role of dedication (Widmung) in garnering patronage for the sciences, a strategy closely related to the legitimation of the mathematical sciences in general and the heliocentric theory in particular (Wissenschaftslegitimierung).

Although the book belongs to a series on early-modern Catholicism, Remmert treats as many as Protestant scholars (for example, Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler, Philippus Lansbergen, John Wilkins) as he does Catholic (Christopher Scheiner, Christopher Clavius, Giovanni Battista Riccioli). He devotes considerable space to Brahe and his attempt to enhance the status of astronomy as a discipline, a trend that continued through the seventeenth century (chapter 6). This elevation of astronomy involved constructing a tradition of astronomy that included not only the customary luminaries such as Alfonso the Wise and Copernicus but also the portrayal of Ptolemy as a king in William Cunningham’s Cosmographicall Glass (1559). Remmert furthers the not-to-be-forgotten work of Nicholas Jardine in the 1980s on Kepler’s attempt to construct a new history of astronomy in his defense of Brahe. These are instances of how the discipline of astronomy experienced a deep-seated change in its aims and self-characterization between Copernicus and Isaac Newton.

Chapter 7 covers the pictorial representations of four Jesuit figures. The author offers enlightening commentary on how a book in early-modern Europe functioned in multiple ways only one of which was to be read. Extending his earlier discussion of Scheiner’s Rosina Ursina (Bracciano, 1630), Remmert demonstrates how the visual representations contained in this volume served the dual purposes of soliciting patronage and fostering the advancement of science itself. The three other Jesuits treated (Mario Bettini, André Schott, Francesco Eschinardi) advance the theme of the application of the mathematical sciences by invoking the imagery of gardens, pictures that to seventeenth-century eyes would no doubt have connected their thoughts to Eden and the implied command in Genesis to increase knowledge for the glory of God and the betterment of the human race.

Given the high quality of this volume, Remmert’s interpretations are nevertheless open to criticism, especially with regard to issues of biblical and scientific authority. His treatment of Scheiner’s Rosa Ursina is rich and nuanced but results in some overstatements. He contends that the difference between Galileo, as expressed in Il Saggiatore, and Scheiner lay in the latter’s vote for the negating authority of the Bible and patristic exegetical consensus even in matters of physical truth. However, the frontispiece of the Rosa Ursina does not necessarily suggest a belief in the superiority of biblical and patristic truth so much as a trust in the concurrence of natural and scriptural knowledge. In general, this book leads the reader into the beautiful world of early-modern representations of scientific ideas.