Astronomical Images : Mystical frontispiece with heavenly rose and the portrait of Saint Bathildis

Christoph Scheiner

Astronomical Images

<p style='text-align: justify;'>The frontispiece of Christoph Scheiner's <i>Rosa Ursina</i> emphatically states the geocentric case. Scheiner (1573-1650) had been long engaged in a not too friendly debate on the nature of sunspots with the ever polemical Galileo, and especially over who had been first to observe them. Scheiner told his side of the story at length in the <i>Rosa Ursina</i>, a detailed treatise on sunspots. In the frontispiece, his epistemological grounds were made clear: without the sacred authority of Holy Scripture and divine inspiration, represented by the <i>Auctoritas Sacra </i>in the top left, true natural philosophy was not possible. The target of this declaration was Galileo, who, according to Scheiner, was not only mistaken in his views about sunspots, but also, and more seriously, in defending the Copernican theory. The main anti-Copernican element of Scheiner's frontispiece is its rendering of the Rose of the Orsini, <i>Rosa Ursina</i>, which formed part of the Orsini family's coat of arms. Scheiner had dedicated his impressive and lavishly decorated folio volume to the Orsini family. The spotted Sun, depicted by the rose of the Orsini, can be seen in the very centre of the frontispiece, moving on the zodiac, thereby refuting the idea of heliocentricity. But there are further connotations in this emblem­atic reverence to the Orsini. In Dante's <i>Divine Comedy</i>, which is full of light and Sun symbolism, par­ticularly towards the end of Paradise, Dante is granted a sight of the heavenly rose, the empyrean, the seat of Mary's apotheosis. Of all the allusions that could be easily inferred from these last few cantos, the concluding line of the <i>Divine Comedy</i> must have seemed wonderfully anti-Copernican to Scheiner, the keen Sun-watcher: 'The divine love that moves the Sun and the other stars' (<i>'L'amor che muove il sole e l'altre stelle'</i>). The connection must also have resonated with the Orsini family, as Virginio II, the father of Paolo Giordano II, had been a renowned Dante scholar.</p>