Review of “Le Macchine Cifrate di Giovanni Fontana”…

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Even though people often assert (rather lazily) that the Voynich Manuscript is the only artefact ‘of its kind’, this is false, because there are plenty of similar documents. For the most part, the significant difference is merely one of scale, not of type – for example, the similar enciphered Quattrocento documents that do exist are neither as well-encrypted nor as large as the VMs.

The critical concept here is, of course, similarity: for Art History is a discipline built around discerning similarities between artefacts not just in terms of content [i.e. that-which-is-being-represented], but also in terms of style, gesture, technique, and approach (though, as Charles Hope points out, this falls over when art historians reconstruct an underlying linking mythology that wasn’t originally there). So, putting our art historian hats on, what are the best matches for the Voynich Manuscript?

Of the various Quattrocento enciphered manuscripts, the ones that really leap out are the books of secrets by Giovanni Fontana, for which the best edition by far is Battisti and Battisti’s (1984) “Le Macchine Cifrate di Giovanni Fontana”. This includes Latin decipherments of the passages in (simple monoalphabetic) cipher, together with a parallel translation into precise modern Italian. My Italian comprehension remains only middling, so making a suitably careful reading of this remains more of a long-term project for me than a short-term one.

Fontana’s manuscripts trace a merry criss-cross pattern across the map of my research interests: ciphers, fountains, alchemy, cars, weapons, and even optics. For the last of these, it was interesting to see folio 70r of Fontana’s Bellicorum Instrumentorum Liber reproduced by Sven Dupre in a recent paper: the Latin plaintext says “Apparentia nocturna ad terrorem videntium“, while the Latin ciphertext reads “Habes modum cum lanterna quam propriis oculis[ocolis] vidi<i>sti ex mea manu fabricatam et proprio ingenio“.

Bellicorum Instrumentorum Liber, folio 70r
Bellicorum Instrumentorum Liber, folio 70r

Also optically interesting are the mirrors on folio 41v “Speculum ingeniosum et admirabile, cuius una pars super alteram ducitur, et clauditur quando opport<et>. Et ex calibe fit ad formam hanc cum foraminibus incident<i>e radiorum, Ymagines aparent deformes, turtuose, inequales, ambigue. Sed eius compositio hic aliter non describitur, nisi sub brevita<te>, ita ut me intelligas. Pars comcava fit sicud specculum combustivum archimed[ni]dis, convexa vero sicud speculum meum de multiplicate formarum.”

Bellicorum Instrumentorum Liber, folios 41v and 42r
Bellicorum Instrumentorum Liber, folios 41v and 42r

But I suspect that it is Voynich researchers who will have most to gain from Battista & Battista’s wide-ranging scholarship. For sheer similarity with the balneological / water section, few would surely disagree with the nymphs bathing in the “Fons Virginum” on folio 43v, with the fountain on folio 31r, and particularly with the “Fons Venetus” (also with a water nymph!) on folios 22v and 23r. [Note to self: remember to get a copy of Frank D. Prager’s “Fontana on Fountains“, Physis XIII, 4, 1971, p.347.]

Bellicorum Instrumentorum Liber, folio 43v
Bellicorum Instrumentorum Liber, folio 43v

Bellicorum Instrumentorum Liber, folio 31r
Bellicorum Instrumentorum Liber, folio 31r

Bellicorum Instrumentorum Liber, folios 22v and 23r
Bellicorum Instrumentorum Liber, folios 22v and 23r

As with the VMs, even though some adjacent folios are definitely in the correct order (such as folios 59v and 60r), I do wonder whether the page order has at least been partially scrambled: to my eyes, the rocket-powered roller-skateboard on folio 16v really ought to sit opposite the rabbit on a rocket-powered roller-skateboard on folio 37r (my favourite Fontana drawing!)

Bellicorum Instrumentorum Liber, folios 59v and 60r
Bellicorum Instrumentorum Liber, folios 59v and 60r

Bellicorum Instrumentorum Liber, folio 16v
Bellicorum Instrumentorum Liber, folio 16v

Bellicorum Instrumentorum Liber, folio 37r
Bellicorum Instrumentorum Liber, folio 37r

In short, there are plenty of similarities between Fontana’s enciphered book of secrets and the Voynich Manuscript: the key difference between the two is simply that heavyweight art historians take the former seriously, but the latter cum grano salis.

What I’m trying to do (in my own slow way) is to construct a proper art historical account of the VMs – a Battista & Battista for the VMs, if you like. However, with only Rene Zandbergen’s site and D’Imperio’s “An Elegant Enigma” to rely upon, this is really quite a daunting challenge, particularly because (as the absence of reaction to my first book would seem to imply) even Voynich researchers appear not to be interested in this kind of research programme. Perhaps because this looks too much like hard work?

I would even go so far as to say that anyone interested in the art history of the VMs should buy a copy of Battista & Battista’s book, simply because of the wealth of notes and thoughts embedded throughout it, nearly all focused on the right kind of areas. There are a few non-stratospherically-priced copies on BookFinder… so what are you waiting for? 🙂

The Invention of Cinemascope…

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The precise sequence of the invention of the telescope (and its early diffusion) remains cloudy: as an intellectual historian, the main issues revolve more around how the key ideas flowed – and, indeed, what ideas were even possible at different times.

I also have a professional interest in lens technologies, and so was fascinated when I recently came across a blog entry giving a French account of the invention of CinemaScope. Without knowing much about the subject, you might guess that it had perhaps been the brainchild of some curiously unfeted American inventor not long before its 1952/1953 debut? Nope, not even close. As even Wikipedia gets right, a “Hypergonar” system based on a distorting lens had been constructed by Professor Henri Chrétien in the 1920s. This was first used commercially by Claude Autant-Lara in 1929 (though only for a couple of months, before the other Parisian film-palaces had it shut down for making them look uncompetitive).

Autant-Lara then got hired by Metro-Goldwyn in 1931, took a number of Hypergonar lenses over to Culver City, waited, waited some more, before finally being told that the system “is of no interest and has no future”. It was only when “This Is Cinerama” opened in New York in 1952 (and caused a public sensation) did film studios start to look at anamorphic wide-screen technologies once more… and all of a sudden Chrétien’s lenses became the order of the day.

But Chrétien didn’t himself invent anamorphic lenses: he had merely “corrected and improved” the basic design from “the work of a German physicist of the 1880s named Lubke” (according to Autant-Lara, when interviewed in 1967). Others had done the same, most notably Professor Ernst Abbe and the Zeiss Company in Germany in 1898 (who called their system “Anamorphot”). In fact, the first patent on anamorphic lenses was far older, going back to Sir David Brewster in 1862 or earlier.

It would be nice to find out if there was anything written on Lubke, as he would seem to be the missing link in this story: however, a quick online search for 19th century German physicists called Lubke / Lübke turned up nothing useful. If anyone wants to pursue this elusive person, I would suggest looking at two publications by Francoise Le Guet Tully, both listed on the French Wikipedia page for Henri Chrétien:-

  • Henri Chrétien (1879-1956). Des Étoiles au Cinemascope. Texte redigee par JEAN-CLAUDE PECKER. Nice. (1987).
  • Henri Chrétien, un savant entre science est technique: réflexions à propos de l’invention de l’hypergonar. International Commitee for the History of Technology. Proceedings of the XVIIIth International ICOHTEC Conference, San Francisco. (1993)

    • If both of those fail to please, then perhaps you might look at a biographical dictionary of German scientists, and/or find out where Henri Chrétien’s papers are held (I already asked about the latter on HASTRO-L, because Chrétien is also famous for having been behind a design that is used by nearly all top-end optical telescopes).

    To me, the mainstream history of the telescope circa 1608 comes over very much as if you were looking at the “invention” of anamorphic cinema circa 1927: though it was very much “in the air” (and so pretty much anyone could have invented it), the simple reason that it was in the air at all was because the basic technological notion had already had more than 50 years of subtle circulation.

    Juan Roget Bibliography now online…

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    Following on from my September 2008 article in History Today, I’ve just posted up an online Juan Roget bibliography listing the current set of primary, secondary, and tertiary references to Girolamo Sirtori’s claim to have met the “first inventor” of the telescope in Gerona.

    While my article received a lot of positive attention from the Spanish media (which was nice, particularly being interviewed in the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford for TVE-1), I did however get quite a bit of negative attention (mainly online) from a few Spanish academics, who felt that I was somehow hijacking Simon de Guilleuma’s original 1959 research, which they claimed was well-known in Spanish history of astronomy reference works – and that I wasn’t actually offering anything new.

    Unsurprisingly, I don’t think this criticism is really very fair. I made it completely clear in my article that it was Simon de Guilleuma’s dogged research from half a century ago that formed the central core of the whole story, and that my relatively modest contribution was limited to suggesting plausible transmission mechanisms by which (a) the Spanish telescope became the Frankfurt telescope, and (b) the Frankfurt telescope then begat the Dutch spyglass. In short, I tried to find a sensible explanation that not only engaged with all the confusing documentary evidence (without being unduly selective, as is too often the case), but also didn’t seek to reduce the parentage of the telescope to some kind of arbitrary quasi-nationalistic either-or choice.

    My belief is simply that Simon de Guilleuma did not, some thirty years before Albert van Helden’s exemplary “The Invention of the Telescope” was published, have access to all the relevant documentary sources. If he had, I am quite sure that he would have been happy to suggest a more complete historical narrative broadly along the lines that I proposed.

    Even if my hypothesis turns out to be wrong, I do think that it will be (what I call) “the right kind of wrong”: which is to say that the narrative that ultimately emerges will likely be a similar kind of synthesis (as opposed to a set of theses and antitheses). To an intellectual historian such as me, the mainstream’s Lipperhey-vs-Janssen-vs-Metius framework yields answers that are “the wrong kind of wrong” – a false choice between three historically implausible narratives, where none of them sits comfortably with the rest of the evidence.

    Review of “The Long Route to the Invention of the Telescope”…

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    Equal parts brilliant and frustrating, Rolf Willach’s “The Long Route to the Invention of the Telescope” (2008), which reprises his featured sessions at the September 2008 conference in Middelburg, is a book formed of two stunningly different halves.

    Through his insightful and breathtakingly meticulous analysis in the first seven chapters, Willach dramatically reconstructs the history of optical craft in the centuries preceding the invention of the telescope. Simply put, by casting the development of optics in terms of the technological and craft-based elements in making glass objects, he has produced without any doubt the most important new writing on the subject in decades. However, in chapters eight to eleven, his obvious eagerness to build on his main findings to retell the history of the telescope leads him to make what seem to me to be terribly, terribly weak inferences. Yet if that were to cause historians to look askance at his whole work, it would be a terrible shame, for there is a huge amount to be proud of here.

    Willach is an independent scholar with his very own tightly-focused research programme: applying quantitative scientific testing methodologies to old lens-like objects to try to understand the ways in which they were made. Over many years in dogged pursuit of this quest, he has examined the Nimrud Lens, the Lothar crystal, lapides ad legendum (reading stones) embedded in liturgical art, curved glass covers in reliquaries, spectacle lenses embedded in a bookcase, rivet spectacles found beneath a nuns’ choir, spectacles in private collections, early telescope lenses etc. Furthermore, there seems to be no end to the range of physical and optical tests he has at his disposal: and he has even built and used his own a replica lens grinding machine. He has also delved deeply into the practical chemistry, physics and craft of glassmaking and glassblowing. In short, in a world where many self-professed experts are content to simply talk a good talk, it is wonderfully refreshing to find someone who has really, really walked the walk.

    For Willach, the physical evidence strongly indicates that spectacle lenses developed not out of reading stones (pieces of rock crystal hand-turned on a wheel but progressively more curved towards the edges), but from the large number of reliquary covers needed to accommodate the tidal wave of martyrs’ relics that washed back into Europe after the Crusades. Just as with the reading stones, these were formed from pieces of rock crystal, and individually ground and polished on some kind of wheel, just as similar items had been turned since antiquity.

    At some stage, glass began (quite understandably) to replace the far more expensive rock crystal. But when? Willach translates (pp.33-37) “cristallum” in the 1284 Venetian trade regulations as if it referred to the innovative Murano cristallo glass invented in the mid-Quattrocento by Angelo Barovier (and which is first documented in the context of a salt cellar in 24th May 1453, according to Gianfranco Toso’s “Murano: A history of glass”, p.46). Here, Willach has got the technological sequence right, but the timeline plain wrong. And so it seems highly likely to me that early glass spectacles were tinted or coloured (as indeed all other glass-made items were at that time), until 1450 at the earliest.

    The first mass-manufactured glass lenses were made in a devastatingly simple way: by blowing a pear-shaped bubble of glass (contrary to popular myth, these bubbles were never spherical), stamping out circular blanks from it, and then subsequently grinding down the concave side of the blanks until flat. Used up until around 1500, this approach produced plano-convex lenses with a distinctive unground curved side and a ground flat side – though occasionally reasonably good near the centre, they were simply not optically good enough to be used in telescopes.

    The next technological change came from Nuremburg, where from around 1478 a small group of spectacle-makers began to produce plano-convex lenses using moulds. For a while, these were ground only on the curved side with the planar side left unground: but it was only about 1500-1510 when both sides began to be ground that the quality of these lenses leapt ahead. This was arguably the first point when telescopes began to become optically possible (but not initially in Italy, for the Nuremberg spectacle-makers managed to keep their secret intact for a long time).

    Yet the hunger of the European mass-market for cheap spectacles meant that, before very long, the quality of mould-made lenses began to go downhill. Ultimately, lens moulds ended up (as Girolamo Sirtori lamented in 1612) simply being hammered roughly into shape rather than measured against a perfect curve. By 1600 or so, all the subtle craft skills required for making good lenses had (apparently) long been forgotten.

    All of which forms the moving technological and craft canvas upon which the history of optical devices (such as telescopes, microscopes, and camera obscuras) was painted: and, thanks to Willach’s sustained efforts, it is now very much better-defined than it has ever been. But… what of the telescope, then?

    As far as the prehistory of the telescope itself goes, there used to be one big open question: despite the fact that convex and concave glasses were produced in large quantity from around 1450, why was the telescope not invented until circa 1600? I think it is a measure of Willach’s massive redefinition of the entire field of study that this now seems hugely simplistic, if not actually naïve. Yet this is essentially the question that he sets out to answer in his final chapters.

    As an example: the writing of Girolamo Fracastoro has long been a curious anomaly in the telescope’s prehistory: in 1538, Fracastoro unambiguously described a twin lens telescopic arrangement – but this apparently was not picked up by anybody. Yet within the framework of optical history as rendered by Willach, I think we can get a glimpse of the reason why that should have been the case: in Fracastoro’s time, the craft of lens making was on the way down – that is, Fracastoro just happened to be living in the brief period early in the 16th century when moulded lenses were still made with a bit of craft in Venice – there was (I conjecture) only a brief window around that time when off-the-shelf lenses would have been good enough to be used in a telescope.

    But why is Willach so certain that things had recovered by 1608? If, as Girolamo Sirtori wrote in 1612 (which Willach approvingly quotes), the craft of spectacle-making had indeed been lost, from where did the craft of telescopes emerge? As I wrote in my September 2008 History Today article, the notion that three Dutchmen all dreamt the same hi-tech dream at the same time (and then went away and executed it independently of each other) is extraordinarily suspect – and, I would now add, the kind of mass-produced, low-quality glass spectacle market that seems to have been in existence circa 1600 makes this even more unlikely.

    But all of this begs a large question about one of Willach’s assumptions. Albert van Helden  baldly expresses the assumption in his introduction to Willach’s book, when he notes that the telescope’s “origins clearly lie in eyeglasses”. I would say that, actually, the first half of Willach’s book does an excellent job in undermining that basic presumption: and that we are now at the point where we can start to glimpse what was really going on – and I now believe it wasn’t anything to do with eyeglasses.

    There was a quite different class of glass-made lens-based optical artefact made at the time, which (thanks to David Hockney) has recently received a significant amount of academic attention and debate (particularly in “Inside the Camera Obscura – Optics and Art under the Spell of the Projected Image“, edited by Wolfgang Lefevre) – the camera obscura. The connection between this and the telescope is a big story yet to be properly grasped and retold: but one strand I would like to flag straightaway comes from Sven Dupré’s fascinating article (in Lefevre’s book), “Playing with Images in a Dark Room: Kepler’s Ludi Inside the Camera Obscura“.

    Kepler mentioned in his 1604 book Paralipomena “an experimentum […] which I saw at Dresden in the elector’s theater of artifices […] A disk thicker in the middle, or a crystalline lens, a foot in diameter, was standing at the entrance of a closed chamber against a little window, which was the only thing that was open, slanted a little to the right. […] But the walls were also particularly conspicuous through the lens, because they were in deep darkness.” But hold on a moment… who made this camera obscura lens, so obviously predating the Dutch telescope? Perhaps it is to letters in a Dresden-linked archive that telescope historians should now be looking…

    Of course, it would be a curious irony if Willach’s scintillating research actually had the effect of severing his presumed link between spectacles and telescopes. And my conclusion (that this is so) will doubtless be no more than one voice amongst many in the field. Regardless: whatever your own angle, I strongly urge you to buy a copy of Willach’s excellent book and make up your own mind. This truly is history in the making – exciting times.

    Review of “Secret Knowledge”…

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    Back in 2001, David Hockney proposed a radical new take on art history: that around 1430, artists began to use a camera obscura arrangement to focus images onto a canvas. This was to help them attain a level of draughting accuracy not available to artists who were simply “eyeballing” (Hockney’s term) a scene. The key paintings he employs as evidence for this claim are Jan Van Eyck’s ultra-famous “Arnolfini Portrait” (1434) and Robert Campin’s “Man In A Red Turban” (circa 1430) [though it’s not actually a turban but a “chaperon” – bet you’re glad you know that].

    What is unavoidably odd about these Flemish pictures is that they suddenly aspire to a level of representational precision that had no obvious precedent – the technique of oil painting (developed much earlier) was suddenly refined and heightened in these artists’ apparent quest for almost (dare I say it) photographic imagery. Hockney sees all this as posing the implicitly technological question “How did they do that?” (particularly things like van Eyck’s highly complex chandelier, which has neither underdrawings nor construction marks): his own answer is that they must have used some unspecified (and now lost) optical means to assist them. But what?

    Initially, this seems likely (he argues) to have been a convex mirror (though somewhat confusingly Hockney calls this a “mirror-lens”) within a camera obscura arrangement: but its technological limitations (particularly the small size of the projected image and the shallow depth of field) would only have allowed them to project one depth slice of one picture element at a time; and so would have required a kind of sequential collage effect to build up a complete composition. Much later (In the 1590s), the mirror was apparently (Hockney asserts) replaced by a lens, with Caravaggio’s two drunken Bacchuses held up as evidence (a “before-the-lens” and an “after-the-lens” pair, if you will).

    Much of the scientific support for Hockney’s claim was provided by depth-of-field and relative size calculations by Charles Falco. Hence it has become known as the “Hockney-Falco thesis”. Really, it is a bold, almost aggressively naive technological-centred re-spin of art history, which sees photography merely as the modern version of a roughly 600-year-old tradition of optically-assisted realistic representation. By all rights, the entire hypothesis should be horribly wrong, with (I would guess) the majority of art historians on the planet looking for a way to help it sink into the sand upon which it appears to be be built. However, it has (quite surprisingly) proved remarkably resilient.

    Actually, many of the criticisms are well-founded: but most seem to be missing the point. Hockney isn’t an art historian (not even close), but a practitioner: praxis is his matrix. Here, he is in the business of imaginative, empathetic knowledge production – which is a necessary part of the whole knowledge-generation cycle. Hockney repeatedly falls into many of David Fischer’s “Historians’ Fallacies” when trying to post-rationalize a narrative onto his observation: but given that historians often follow these same antipatterns, it is hardly surprising that an accidental historian such as Hockney fails to avoid them too.

    Admirably, Hockney tried to respond to many of his critics by bringing together an intriguing selection of from primary sources on optics and the camera obscura (not dissimilar to the second half of Albert van Helden’s splendid “The Invention of the Telescope”). And so the “new and expanded” 2006 edition of his (2001) “Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the lost techniques of the Old Masters” has appended English translations of many relevant historical texts (Bacon, Alhazan, Witelo, Manetti, Leonardo, Cardano, Barbaro, Della Porta, etc), as well as correspondence from 1999-2001 between Hockney and various people (mainly the very excellent Leonardo expert Martin Kemp, who squeeze in several satisfyingly good whinges about academe along the way).

    OK: enough folksy summarizing, already. So, what do I think about all this?

    For a start, this obviously cuts a path right through a lot of my ongoing research interests – Quattrocento secret knowledge & books of secrets, the mirror+lens combinations, early camera obscuras, Renaissance proto-telescopes, the emergence of modern optics 1590-1612. So I ought to have an opinion, right?

    In a way, the unbelievable technical prowess of the Old Masters – their sheer blessèd giftedness – has been so much of a given for so long that to have David Hockney waltz in & undermine that is quite shocking. And all credit to Martin Kemp for grasping so early on that this points to such a potentially significant sea-change in the tides of academic art history.

    I’m hugely sympathetic to Hockney: I did a bit of painting (though many years ago), and I have a professional interest in camera optics & the subtle problems of image perception – so I can see very clearly the artefacts in the paintings upon which he and Charles Falco are focusing. In a very important way, that’s the easy bit.

    Yet one of the problems I have with the correspondence reproduced at the back of the book is that it gives the overwhelming impression that Hockney is all too ready to leap to the conclusion that the Church would deem this kind of image capturing a new kind of heresy: that that which is not understood must be occult. This exact same non-argument template (along the lines of ‘if the evidence isn’t there, it must have been suppressed for being heretical’) gets trotted out ad nauseam for many other hard-to-explain historical mysteries (perhaps most notably for the Voynich Manuscript): and, quite frankly, turns me right off every time I see it.

    But the reason for this is obvious: the quality of the non-pictorial evidence Hockney cites to support his case is generally rather poor. He simply doesn’t have a smoking gun – nor even a non-smoking gun, really. He’s reduced to speculating about the nature of the mirrors Caravaggio owned when he died: and, frankly, that’s not really sufficient. When he can’t even point to a single substantive mention in a single pre-1500 letter or document, it’s easy to see why the whole hypothesis remains speculative (historically speaking).

    I suspect one good question that should be asked is instead about the quality of the translations we are all relying upon to form our critical judgments on this. When tackling an early modern passage, translators must first conceive what kind of thing is being talked about when trying to give the text a shape comprehensible to our modern mindsets. And when something as basic as using curved mirrors as a painting aid has only just entered our collective awareness, I think it is likely that almost all translators of primary sources would have fudged over difficult or obscure passages. And so the ‘absence of evidence’ may ultimately have arisen from a missing conceptual framework in translators’ minds.

    For what it is worth, my best guess is that there will turn out to be some primary evidence to support Hockney’s ideas, but that it won’t be a new passage: rather, it will turn out to be a known passage that was subtly mistranslated. But which should we be reassessing?

    I’ve checked Thorndike (as you would) and Sabine Melchior-Bonnet (of which Hockney seems blissfully unaware) for ideas: the latter discusses Parmigianino’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” (1524) on p.227, which should contain sufficient information for an optical historian to reconstruct the size and focal length of the mirror used. She gives many other leads: for example, Fioravanti discusses mirrors in his “Miroir des arts et des sciences”, and there is yet more discussion in Salomon de Caus (1576-1626)’s book “Perspective avec la raison des ombres et des miroirs”. Yet ultimately, if there is a smoking gun, it probably sits waiting to be found in 15th century letters and books of secrets.

    Regardless of how much moral support it gains, Hockney’s hypothesis continues to stand parallel to the art history mainstream: it awaits a truly daring art historian to look again at the sources, and to tease out the subtle behind-the-scenes narrative. This kind of reconstructionist approach (not unlike Rolf Willach’s take on telescope history) yields one kind of evidence – but only one, and so this is not the whole story. Life is never quite that simple…

    Review of “Bearing the Heavens”…

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    I’ve just come back from 24 hours in Swansea, a town where, bizarrely, almost every road is one way (usually the opposite way to which you want to go). At the top of Mount Pleasant, students eke out their existence, one drunken stumble away from a 5-minute death-roll down Constitution Hill’s 45 degree gradient. Swansea is the kind of place where (ideally) you’d like a hang-glider to get to town, a satnav implant to get around, and a cable-car to get home again. But still, the beer’s good, so I can forgive all that… 😉

    All of which springs to mind simply because I’ve just read a book on Tycho Brahe by Adam Mosley, history lecturer at the University of Swansea. From his office, most of the bright lights in the evening sky are doubtless not stars or planets, but roomlights in digs at the top of the hill, full of students massaging their aching quads and calves, & wondering why their 50cc scooter’s clutch burnt out in only two days.

    In many ways, Mosley’s book – “Bearing The Heavens: Tycho Brahe and the Astronomical Community of the Late Sixteenth Century” (2007), Cambridge University Press, ISBN13: 9780521838665, £55.00, US$105.00 – dovetails quite neatly with “On Tycho’s Island”, as reviewed here recently: whereas the latter looks inwards at Brahe’s insular life on Hven, the former instead looks outwards to Brahe’s links with the external world. To do this, Mosley focuses on three things – Brahe’s letters, his books, and his instruments.

    The writing is brisk and accessible throughout (though I felt devoting the first chapter to a justification of why he chose the punning title “Bearing the Heavens” was somewhat superfluous), and the two big chapters on books and instruments cover the ground well. But I have to say that this is all a bit of a feint, a distraction from Mosley’s actual thesis – which is concerned solely with the importance to the history of science of Brahe’s letters in their context. This is the real deal, the stuff that you can tell he’s excited about here.

    And, I think, rightly so – Mosley’s book essentially sends out a ‘call to adventure’ to historians of Renaissance science, that they have woefully undervalued the usefulness of letters. Book publishing is just the tip of the iceberg of ideas – even these days, printing your own books is no walk in the park (trust me, I’ve tried it), and the difficulties involved 400-500 years ago were far greater, even for driven people of significant means such as Brahe. Renaissance letters were often copied and circulated, or even collated for later publication: and so Mosely argues that it is the huge interconnected web of letters that form the underwater bulk – and it is to this largely unseen mountain we should be devoting our attention.

    Regular readers of this blog will know that this is a zeitgeisty angle (though perhaps still falling just short of being trendy), exemplified by (for example) Josef Smolka’s ongoing study of Tadeas Hajek’s letters to/from Andreas Dudith. What separates Mosley’s exposition is that he simply does not accept that it is a marginal area for study – for him, correspondence is king, and should occupy centre stage for our understanding of science pre-1600.

    For a while, I’ve been thinking along these lines: I even tried creating a database in Freebase to try to map out & visualize the connections between various 16th century letter-writers, to try to glimpse the “invisible colleges” as they formed, flourished and faded. Yet when I saw Mosley’s Figure 2.1 on page 36 (which tries to do this for Brahe’s immediate network), I suddenly realised the staggering enormity of the challenge and gave up on the spot.

    Fig 2.1 from Adam Mosley\'s \

    Ultimately, what historians of science would need is a gigantic collaborative correspondence database, that could be used as a cross-archive finding aid. Even though a few people’s letters have been studied in depth (such as Christopher Clavius, Tycho Brahe, Athanasius Kircher, etc), libraries and archives (particularly private archives) must still have an enormous collection of pearls of which historians are unaware.

    Perhaps others have already advanced Mosley’s thesis just as eloquently and persuasively: but it is an idea whose time (I believe) has now come. Will others heed his call? I hope so…

    Review of “On Tycho’s Island”…

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    People don’t generally know a lot about Tycho Brahe, which is a shame. In most accounts of the history of astronomy, his bright star tends to get eclipsed by the twin 17th century supernovae of Kepler and Galileo. But scratch the surface of the story, and it’s really not that simple…

    Brahe was a Danish nobleman with a singleminded desire – to understand why the motions of the planets in the heavens failed to match what the best astronomical tables (based both on Ptolemaic and Copernican systems) predicted. Somehow, he engineered an arrangement by which King Frederick II granted him the island of Hven to pursue his astronomical studies for the glory of Denmark: yet what Brahe set up there was as much a social institution (like a postgraduate research community) as a technical observatory – to get the job done, he needed people just as much as equipment.

    In fact, Tycho tried to get all the brightest young astronomers of the time to work on his island (for peanuts, it has to be said, but that’s research for you), and to correspond with everyone who was anyone in astronomy. Even so, things didn’t always work out as planned, most notably with Ursus (though I believe the question of whether Ursus was as big a scoundrel and weasel as Brahe tried to make out is far more open than most historians credit).

    Methodologically, Brahe’s biographers and historians have tended to focus on the man and his writings: yet until recently none specifically focused on his ever-changing familia (family) of research assistants that passed through Hven. John Robert Christanson’s book “On Tycho’s Island: Tycho Brahe and His Assistants 1570-1601” (Cambridge University Press, 2000) changed all that: what started out (quite literally) as Christianson’s shoe-box of notecards to pull together the numerous fragmentary mentions of Brahe’s coworkers slowly grew into a database, and then (25 years on) into the present book.

    But there’s a problem: however interested you are in the subject, after a while the database-like origins of the book – in the infinitessimal ebbs and flows of the set of assistants – start to grate on the reader. And let’s face it, what Brahe was running was as much a kind of “observation factory” as anything else, turning (taking a Marxist-Leninist spin) a input stream of idealistic researchers into a output stream of data. After around 150 pages of on-island minutiae, you start to wonder: where is this all going? How much more can I take?

    And then on page 171, Christianson’s book explodes in a direction you simply won’t (unless you’re extraordinarily well-read on Brahe’s life) have seen coming. Brahe tries to marry off his eldest morganatic daughter (“morganatic” means that when a nobleman marries a commoner, his children won’t inherit his nobility or money) to Gellius Sascerides, a clever (but church-mouse poor) member of his familia. And then everything – and I mean everything – starts to go wrong for Brahe (and at some speed), to the point that he ends up dismantling his beloved observatory and fleeing the country. Thanks to his Europe-wide network of contacts (particularly Tadeas Hajek), he finally ended up working for Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II in Prague (though only briefly) – but even so, Brahe’s swings in fortune are really quite staggering.

    It’s only once you reach the end of the book that you can appreciate what happened in terms of his two familiae. Given that neither his morganatic children nor his set of researchers and coworkers seemed likely to him to give him the continuing legacy he desired, what was Brahe to do? He tried to finesse a best-of-both-worlds scenario, but the attempted union of his morganatic family and his (almost adoptive) intellectual family was simply never going to work within his societal context. It is only really a proper appreciation for his constellation of assistants on Hven that gives his whole story poignancy.

    Writing teachers often say that the beginning of a story is rarely the best place to start: and so many writers would start “Brahe: The Novel” with the attempted negotiations for the wedding (and bring in all the preceding history in flashbacks etc), because this is where the wedding train (sorry!) starts to come off the rails – and where oh-so-controlling Brahe begins to lose the plot. Yet what Christianson has produced is rather more valuable than a novel: a rich, dense, vividly-detailed historical stage upon which the reader can imagine and construct their own dramas.

    Overall verdict: Highly Recommended (but don’t give up in the middle!)

    A nice day out in Oxford…

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    TVE, the Spanish national TV company, wanted to interview me about my History Today telescope article. For visual props, they requested a 17th century telescope and a copy of Girolamo Sirtori’s book – fair enough. A quick search of COPAC revealed eight copies across the UK: but what jumped out at me from the list was that there was a copy at the Museum of the History of Science (“the MHS”) in Oxford, which I knew had a fair few telescopes – and so I suggested the interview be carried out there. Plus, I’d wanted to go there for years and years. 🙂

    All of which is how I ended up having a nice day out in Oxford. Though the MHS has all kinds of historical scientific gubbins (particularly the basement, which vividly brought to mind Thomas Dolby and Magnus Pyke singing “all my tubes and wires and careful notes / and antiquated notions“), you can’t help but notice its collection is dominated by astrolabes, astrolabes, and more astrolabes. Did I mention they have a beautiful spherical astrolabe too? You get the basic idea: it’s Astrolabe City.

    After the interview, I went downstairs to the MHS library to look at their copy of Sirtori’s book for myself (I’d only ever seen scans of it). I also played “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours” with Gemma Wright, the Head Librarian: I showed her my copy of Jim Morrison’s very cool book “The Astrolabe”, while she showed me the MHS’ copy of John Lamprey’s 2007 English edition of Stoeffler’s Elucidatio (also very neat, a snip at $50 + S&H). Errrm… I’m not quite sure why I’m making myself look like “ubergeek of the week” here, so perhaps I ought to stop…

    As an aside: though the steak & ale pie in The White Horse (the pub opposite the MHS) was OK, their Dark Star “Sunburst” was epic – just like being in a beer festival (only without a covers band playing “Mustang Sally” too loud, thank goodness). Just in case you ever happen to be thirsty in Oxford! 😉

    “History Today” Spanish telescope article…

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    At the beginning of this year, I became interested in the mystery surrounding the invention of the telescope, spurred by Richard SantaColoma’s outrageous claims that the enciphered Voynich Manuscript contained images of telescopes disguised as strange tiered albarelli. But really, who did invent the telescope? Where did it come from?

    At first, I thought the answer ought to be straightforward to find out, particularly as this year (in fact this month, September 2008) marks the 400th anniversary of the supposed invention. But the more accounts I read, the less I believed.

    You see, for four centuries, people have asserted that three Dutchmen suddenly invented the telescope all at the same time: but my opinion is that this is a placeholder for an explanation rather than a proper explanation – bluntly, whatever actually happened back then, you can be fairly sure that that wasn’t it.

    When you strip it all down, there are basically two rival accounts to choose from: the mainstream story (“three Dutchmen invented it, take your pick whichever you prefer“) and the one offered by the Milanese rich kid courtier Girolamo Sirtori in his 1618 book “Telescopium, siue Ars perficiendi nouum illud Galilaei visorium instrumentum ad sydera”. Essentially, Sirtori said that he had gone to Gerona and met the real ‘first inventor’ of the telescope, a man called Roget of Burgundy: however, given all the uncontestable documentation in Dutch archives, historians had long thought this too marginal a research lead to pursue. And anyway, Sirtori offered no means by which Spain and Holland were connected.

    However, I managed (thanks to Google and the helpful staff of the Municipal Archive in Barcelona) to dig up a transcript of an obscure 1959 radio broadcast written by a particularly dogged investigator called Jose Maria Simon de Guilleuma – an optometrist, scientific instrument collector and amateur historian from Barcelona. He was so intrigued by Sirtori’s account that he spent probably a decade or more sifting through numerous Spanish and French archival sources – and in so doing verified much of Sirtori’s story.

    Fascinating stuff! And furthermore, when I combined Simon’s findings with more up-to-date research, a brand new narrative of the invention of the telescope presented itself, which I believe joins all the disparate pieces together (in a kind of intellectual history sort of way).

    I wrote up my findings and reconstruction, sanity checked them with several very experienced telescope historians, and submitted them as a fairly substantial article to History Today (it’s on the front cover, you can’t miss it). Perhaps it’ll cause a stir, perhaps not – but all the same, it’s certainly a fully-rounded hypothesis which I hope will prove to be a spur to other historians and researchers to look that bit further.

    There’s a short piece in the Guardian today by Ian Sample, and I did a short interview on Radio 4’s Today programme this morning: there’s also a longer piece in El Mundo, and doubtless several more to come out this week. But for the full story, you’ll have to buy a copy of History Today for yourself… 🙂

    “I told you I’d be back…”

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    After a summer break full of dull-as-ditchwater technical woes, I’ve finally managed to restart my rusty old “Voynich News” blog (on Blogger) as the shiny new “Cipher Mysteries” blog (on WordPress). Although I’m most of the way through migrating the 200-ish old posts over *sigh*, what you’re reading now should (fingers crossed) be the first new post.

    Incidentally, I’ve got a busy week coming up, with my big telescope article finally coming out in History Today – there’s plenty of media interest in it going on behind the scenes, so should be “interesting times”. I also have six book reviews on their way here (including Adam Mosley’s “Bearing the Heavens” and Richard Belfield’s “Six Unsolved Ciphers”), as well as a whole heap of meaty historical cipher stuff to cover: but please bear with me while I get this new site straight – getting it all ship-shape again will take a few days…

    In the meantime, you might enjoy the funny picture I put up on the Cipher Mysteries ‘about’ page… Enjoy! 🙂