The Deep Space Time artist Julie Hill looks at the intertwining of the divine and cosmic in this portrait of Copernicus where the parallel is made to a ships captain navigating his ship of reason into a forever expanded universe. His reordering of our solar system could be perhaps considered our first modern growing up. The painting clearly reverberates with Poland’s intellectual gift to the world and the re-founding its identity in the moment where it had been torn apart by Russia, Prussia, and Austria. – G.M.
The figure of Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) is carefully poised, his eyes turned towards the heavens in awe. He kneels in reverence, arms outstretched, entranced in heavenly communication. Cascading folds of verdant green fabric tumble to his side, capturing all the drama of a Romantic painting in this monumental 10ft wide canvas. As curator Christopher Riopelle explains: ‘one of Matejko’s great talents is his ability to marshal information in a painting, so that we understand the emotions and can generate the story within ourselves.’ There is a palpable sense of Copernicus’s emotion, although initially I found it easy to conflate this painting as enshrining the moment of scientific discovery itself: of that paradigm-shifting moment when a revolution occurred in one man’s mind, reframing the way we have understood our place in the cosmos ever after. Aside from the fact the Ancient Greeks made the same discovery as Copernicus centuries earlier, other details tell us this is not the case.
To Copernicus’s side sits his famous diagram of the Heliocentric system – of the Earth and the known planets circling around the Sun, dethroning man from his privileged position at the centre of things (Matejko spotted the historical anachronism of the telescope he had previously intended for this position, as seen in the preparatory sketch on the adjacent wall). The presence of the diagram tells us that his discovery has already taken place. Copernicus wielding compass, instrument of science, is in fact communicating his discovery to God. His skyward glance seems to also simultaneously reaffirm some semblance of the Ptolemaic system of orderly spheres inhabited by God and his angels. It was essential for Matejko to reconcile Copernicus’s discovery with the teachings of the church.
Polish artist Jan Matejko (1838–1893) worked through the height of Romanticism, a movement where artists sought to express that quality of greatness or grandeur that inspires awe and wonder known as the sublime. This category of aesthetic experience was frequently depicted in majestic scenes of natural landscapes. The vastness of nature was a device to reach towards the numinous or the divine. Our night skies – comprising all of deep space and cosmological time – are as much a part of nature as the Earth that extends deep beneath our feet – and offers, in my opinion, the ultimate sublime. The focus on the emotion of the human subject is novel in this sense, and also takes us away from the visual clichés we find in the vivid Hubble imagery and astrophotography of today.
If the grandeur of a planetary world in which the earth, as a grain of sand, is scarcely perceived, fills the understanding with wonder; with what astonishment are we transported when we behold the infinite multitude of the Milky Way. But, how is this astonishment increased when we become aware of the fact that all these immense orders of star-worlds again form but one number whose termination we do not know, and which perhaps like the former, is a system inconceivably vast – and yet again but one member in a new combination of numbers … there is here no end but an abyss of real immensity, in presence of which all the capability of human conception sinks exhausted, although it is supported by the aid of the science of number.
Immanuel Kant, Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens, 1755
Philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), described two forms of the sublime, the mathematical and the dynamical: two qualities we are led into thinking about with Matejko’s painting. Whilst the climatic moment of man (Copernicus) facing cosmos and creator captures that feeling of powerlessness in face of the vastness of nature – or the divine, the subject of scientific practice, takes us towards the mathematical. Fifteenth century astronomy had its own technologies to help measure and predict the position of stars and planets. As above, at Copernicus’s time, the telescope was not yet invented. The exhibition gives us an insight into how the rational mind was assisted in calculating such vast cosmic distances using instruments such as an exquisitely engraved Astrolabe and Torquetum. These devices measured astronomical coordinates and calculated their relationships, thereby ‘contributing to the very early steps in modern data processing’. Copernicus’ work was not that different from that of a contemporary astronomer who is more likely to be found crunching code on their laptop, than gazing night-after-night at the heavens.
I enjoyed this bringing together of art and science – of The Two Cultures as C P Snow termed it in his famous essay of the same name, that laments the cultural divide that has since grown between the arts and the sciences. The painting gives an entry point to thinking about how both the artist and the scientist come to imagine and represent the immensity of the cosmos and the overlaps between these ways of knowing. However, a sense of masculine and nationalistic glory pervades the exhibition – Matejko was a revolutionary himself whose motivations in this painting was to present an argument for Polish nationality and independence. There are clear parallels drawn between artist and subject: Matejko, the great Polish artist and Copernicus, the great Polish scientist, leaving me with lingering thoughts about what other stories could and should be told about our cosmic understanding, for example, from a female or non-Western lens.
Free admission
Jan Matejko’s Copernicus
Conversations with God
Until 22 August 2021
Location: Room 46
https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/exhibitions/conversations-with-god-jan-matejkos-copernicus
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Julie F Hill is a British artist whose works sculptural installations explore conceptions of deep space and time. Recent publications include ‘The Chemical Kinship of Stony Entities, co-written with Dr Valerie Olson (available via Land Art Agency); and Uncertain Ruins, essay and exhibition catalogue (available via Passengers).