Copernican Revolutions of the Visible Time: The Intersections of Astronomy, Geology and Art from 17th to 19th Century

Syllabus

The course will proceed over specific texts (Copernicus, Brahe, Bruno, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Pringle, Werner, Goethe, Hutton, Lyell) and images (Raffael, Dürer, Giotto, Cigoli, Hevelius, Seghers, Caspar David Friedrich, contemporary science fiction), as well as motifs (comets, meteors, globes, new worlds, imaginary travels, utopia, gravity, providence, extra-terrestrial intelligence...) to show how the imagination „processed“ the universe and how the space continually lost its providential innocence and became vast, infinite and indifferent - and how 18th century surprisingly fought with it's own discoveries, whose ambivalence is still present in the contemporary discussions about colonizing outer planets. We will also visit Prague's observatory.

Annotation

The course will focus on the key changes in the imagination of the cosmos in the European culture of the 17th to 19th century, ignited by the Copernican heliocentric system and Galileo‘s subsequent discovery of Jupiter‘s moons, followed by Kepler's soulful physics and Newton‘s expulsion of God and crowned by Hutton's positive proof of the Earth's „deep time“ that „infected“ and „disintegrated“ the classical universe. This double revolution challenged not only human imagination, but man‘s self-esteem as well, questioning his very place among the newly invented cosmic wastelands.

The course will thus not only present an overview of this remarkable change, but will pose and answer two mutually interconnected questions: what is the role of art and imagination in articulating the modern universe, up to this day (from NASA/ESA projects to SpaceX)? And is it possible to forget about the „heavens above“?