Claiming CopernicusPatricia 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 Brechtdramatically portrayed a head-on conflict between Gali-leo’s science and the Catholic Church in order to castigateNazi 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 familiarto Brecht’s German audiences although more contentious.Chauvinistic German scholars had long been arguing aboutCopernicus’ nationality, but after Poland regained itsindependence in 1920 the Poles celebrated MikoŁajKopernik – Copernicus – as a Polish iconic figurehead.However, when a set of stamps commemorating theanniversary of Copernicus’ death was produced during theGerman occupation of Poland in World War II, it carried aborder of swastikas and used the spelling of his namestipulated by Adolf Hitler – Nikolaus Kopernikus [2].

Historians as well as politicians have debated Coper-nicus’ heroic status. In old-fashioned accounts, he featuresas the revolutionary astronomer who broke the shackles ofAristotelianism and placed the Sun rather than the Earthat the centre of the universe. More timid than Galileo, heavoided challenging biblical authority by hiding behindAndreas Osiander’s unsigned letter, which formed apreface disguising Copernicus’ radical model of the cosmosas a mere hypothesis. Such simplistic eulogies have beenrevised several times, and – as with Galileo – theconfrontations between Copernicus and the religiousestablishment have been more carefully painted. Cur-rently Copernicus is presented as a diplomatic Churchfunctionary, a learned and artistic humanist: rather thanbeing terrified of the Pope’s fury, Copernicus sought hispatronage as he endeavoured to persuade the Churchauthorities that his own ideas were right [3].

The anonymous devotional portrait shown in Figure 1provides supporting evidence for this subtler interpret-ation. Possibly based on a self-portrait, it was painted for

Corresponding author: Fara, P. (pf10006@cam.ac.uk).Available online 4 November 2005

www.sciencedirect.com 0160-9327/$ - see front matter Q 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

the church at Torun, Copernicus’ birthplace, 40 years afterhis death, and it shows Copernicus the Christian ratherthan Copernicus the Cosmologist. The metal dividers andarmillary sphere on the shelf behind his head are thetraditional tools of an intellectual astronomer. However,the sombre signs of mortality – the wooden crucifix andthe skull – are far more prominent, and are emphasizedstill further by the contrast with his scarlet jerkin. TheLatin verse, which may have been chosen by Copernicusas his own epitaph, is one of 34 odes on Christ’s sufferingwritten by the future Pope Pius II:

Not grace the equal of Paul’s do I ask,Nor Peter’s pardon seek, but whatTo 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 depictingCopernicus in a very different context – ChristopherHartnoch’s Alt und Neues Preussen (Prussia Old and New). The Latin title of the image identifies Copernicus as adistinguished Prussian mathematician, and he has beenappropriately transformed into an older scholar with bushyhair – no sign here of the skull and gloomy landscape. Thisaltered copy is interesting because it influenced subsequentdepictions of Copernicus, which share the way in which theyreverse the original, as if the Torun portrait had beenreflected in a mirror. This effect occurs during printing if theengraver copies a picture directly on to the plate [4].

In 1943, Polish exiles in the USA organized worldwidecelebrations to commemorate a double 400th anniversary– that of Copernicus’ death and the publication of his DeRevolutionibus Orbium Cœlestium (On the Revolutions ofthe Heavenly Spheres). To help advertise their pro-grammes they recruited Arthur Szyk, a refugee artistwho specialized in the techniques of illuminating mediae-val manuscripts, to produce the bright miniature inFigure 2. It is packed with Polish symbolism. The nationalcolours of red and white dominate the lower part, wherethe royal eagle wears a crown to indicate that Poland wasfree during Copernicus’s lifetime. At the top left Wawelcastle and cathedral sit on a hill above Krakow, the townwhere Copernicus attended university and which was thecapital of Poland in his era. The university coat-of-arms ison the right, accompanied by the date of its foundation(1364) and renovation (1400).

This portrait provided Polish political propagandaduring World War II. Although his face is similar to thereversed copy of Figure 1, Copernicus (no Hitlerian Ks inthe Latin form Copernicus used himself) is now richlyclothed, sporting the formal chain and fur-trimmed cap ofa Polish academic. Echoing the religious imagery

Review Endeavour Vol.29 No.4 December 2005

. doi:10.1016/j.endeavour.2005.08.002

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.

Figure 2. A Polish Copernicus. Coloured miniature by Arthur Szyk, 1943; q The

Kosciuszko Foundation, an American centre for Polish Culture.

Review Endeavour Vol.29 No.4 December 2005 149

www.sciencedirect.com

contained in the earlier portrait, Copernicus holds up aminiature model of a planet orbiting around the sun andclasps his astronomical dividers. The lantern at the frontleft resembles those Copernicus used in his observationtower at night, but it also plays on metaphors of the sun asa god or king radiating glory and bestowing the light ofunderstanding. On the table, a copy of the Bible isoverwhelmed by the famous golden globe that belongedto the Jagiellonian royal family. Driven by clockwork, theJagiellonian globe was the first such model of the solarsystem constructed along Copernican lines. In the detailthat Szyk included on the surface of the globe, the artisticpatriot who had fled to New York has identified only onecontinent – ‘America, the newly discovered land’.

On the Latin scrolls at the bottom right, the lower onesays ‘He told the sun to stop and the earth to spin. He wasa Pole’. This is an ingenious transformation of the savageLatin comments made in the 16th century by PhilipMelanchthon. Denigrating Copernicus as a member of theSarmatians, an Iranian nomadic tribe from which Slavswere reputed to descend, Melanchthon accused him offoolishly 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, aplanetary diagram is headed ‘Copernicus died, but sciencewas born’; visible on the curled-up reverse side of thediagram is the Polish equivalent of the Latin tribute onthe right [5].

Science is supposedly an international enterprise, but –as Brecht realized – local heroes have often been co-optedto serve political ends. During the 19th century, artistsabandoned attempts to portray Carl Linnaeus realisticallyas a small, dark man, and instead converted him into aNordic icon with blond hair and blue eyes [6]. Similarly,post-war Britain declared its independence of America byhailing Alexander Fleming as the lone discoverer ofpenicillin: this Scottish scientist was depicted as thesuccessor of Caractatus, the first-century Catuvellaunianking who repelled the Romans, and also of Francis Drake,the English naval commander who defeated the SpanishArmada [7]. Now that Poland is no longer under eitherGerman or Russian rule it continues to reclaim its ownfamous figureheads, including scientific icons such asMikoŁaj Kopernik and Manya SkŁodowska (Marie Curie).

References

1 From scene 13 in Brecht’s 1939 play The Life of Galileo, as quoted inKnowles, E., ed. (1999) The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, OxfordUniversity Press (Oxford, UK), p. 149

2 Gingerich, O. (1999) The Copernican Quinquecentennial and itsPredecessors: Historical Insights and National Agendas. Osiris 14, 37–60

3 Westman, R.S. (1990) Proof, Poetics, and Patronage: Copernicus’sPreface to De Revolutionibus. In Reappraisals of the ScientificRevolution (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 thecover)

6 Koerner, L. (1999) Linnaeus: Nature and Nation, Harvard UniversityPress, pp. 181–182

7 Bud, R. (1998) Penicillin and the New Elizabethans. British Journal forthe History of Science 31, 305–333