Few of the painters of China’s southeast were as original, or as eccentric, as Wu Bin. But most work from the region was informed by the traditions of earlier dynasties, as was Wu’s, and like him many painters from the southeast were professionals. Often they worked anonymously, in the early years of the Ming creating many large works for public buildings such as temples and government offices. But by the late Ming patronage for such projects had declined, in part because the influx of vast quantities of silver into the economy through the pan-Pacific trade had enabled a larger number of young men to become educated, take the state examinations, and enter the literati class than in the past. The result was an excess of scholars, some of whom fell back on painting when the traditional bureaucratic positions turned out to be unavailable. The preference for literati painting championed by Dong Qichang and the enlarged pool of educated painters combined to reduce the opportunities for professional painters to produce such public works, and many turned to making smaller paintings for private individuals.
One of these was Zhao Zuo, a painter from Songjiang (now a part of Shanghai), where an atmospheric style of painting that stood in contrast to the hard, intellectual style of Dong Qichang was popular. Zhao was quiet and reserved, and impoverished; consequently, not much is known of his life. He spent his later years living with his family on the shores of a picturesque lake where he admired the scenery. But he did leave an essay on his painting, in which he extolls the virtue of “dynamic force” as a key principle. “If you capture this dynamic force in your mountains,” he said, “then even when they coil and twist from top to bottom they will be strung together. If you capture it in your forests, even those that are irregular and diverse from front to back will be clearly readable.”
In the cold winter of 1616, during the Little Ice Age, Zhao painted a large vertical scroll of Piled Snow on Cold Cliffs (p. 132, 141). To James Cahill the painting is “startling” for its use of Western techniques of “illusionistic chiaroscuro rendering” — Zhao uses contrasts of light and shadow to model three-dimensional forms in a way that was not common in traditional Chinese painting.
Zhao was a friend of Dong Qichang. One of his paintings, which shows similar modeling with light and shadow, bears the seal of Dong Qichang on it. Dong must have been aware of Western art, but he never alluded to it, acknowleged it, or showed overt evidence of having been influenced by it.
Following the riot that destroyed his home and drove him from it, Dong applied himself to painting and also sought to restore his reputation through political advancement. When the Wanli emperor died in 1620 his successor, the Taichang emperor, is said to have remembered his former tutor and summoned Dong back to court. The Taichang emperor reigned only one month, but by 1622 Dong was back in the capital, where he served in a succession of important posts, rising higher than any other artist of the Ming dynasty. But by 1525 he had again succumbed to its poisonous infighting and was impeached on a variety of charges, among them that he was “besotted by calligraphy and painting.”
In his seventies Dong once more retired to the south, yet within six years he would again be back in the capital. Finally, in 1636, shortly before the fall of the Ming, he headed south for the last time. His friend and fellow painter Chen Jiru described what happened:
When Dong returned home from the north he was eighty-one. Brilliant and vigorous, with beard and eyebrows flowing in the wind, he had the air of a far-off immortal…. He suddenly began to cough up phlegm, and not three days later he was dead. The crown of his head was hot, and his limbs were like cotton floss. Was he not what the Buddhist would call “one without pain and suffering, bound by no evil bonds”?
None of his three sons — two of whom “had earned for themselves an unsavory reputation, even before the burning of the Dong estate in 1616,” according to scholar C. C. Riely — shared their father’s scholarly bent. None passed the official examinations. Nor did Dong’s grandchildren distinguish themselves. But his theories would form the standard approach to Chinese painting for centuries of scholars.
Dong and his wife were buried together near the city of Zuchou. The gravesite was honored with memorial arches and a temple. They no longer exist. In 1967, during the Cultural Revolution, the tomb was looted and trashed. The stele containing Dong’s epitaph, now lost, was destroyed. But by the end of the twentieth century Dong’s fortunes were again on the rise. Scholars from around the world assembled at the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City, Missouri, to honor Dong and argue about his theory of creative imitation.
Astronomical clock, fifteenth century. Palazzo del Capitanio, Padua, Italy.
Throughout the Renaissance and the early modern period, astronomical clocks were in vogue. These ingenious and sophisticated clocks attempted to show the conjunctions of celestial bodies as an aid in casting horoscopes. The first such clock was constructed in Padua in the fourteenth century; a rebuilt version was placed on the tower of the Palazzo del Capitanio in the fifteenth century.
Galileo Galilei would have passed under this clock often during his twelve years on the faculty of the University of Padua. Although today we think of astronomers such as Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler, Taqi al-Din, and Galileo as scientists, they were more broadly considered in their day to be “stargazers.” Employed in this capacity by their royal and aristocratic patrons, they combined scientific observations and mathematical calculations with astrological calendars and predictions.
4Witch Hunters and Truth Seekers
On January 1, 1616 — the same date that The Golden Age Restored was being performed in the royal banqueting hall at Whitehall, London, and a massive galleon was pulling into the port of Acapulco in New Spain — the astronomer Johannes Kepler wrote a letter to the Senate of Leonberg, a town near the city of Stuttgart in southwest Germany, on behalf of his mother, Katharina, who stood accused of practicing witchcraft. Kepler was an exceptionally learned man, an inspired mathematician who worked out the laws of planetary motion that would lead Newton to formulate the principle of gravity; but his mother, like many women of the time, was illiterate. Now in her seventies, she was an herbalist, like her aunt, who had already been burned at the stake as a witch. While Kepler embodied the worldview of the male literati, whose ideas of the world were codified in written texts, his mother represented the old folk traditions, knowledge of which often resided in women, passed from mother to daughter. With the spread of literacy to a greater range of society, such folk knowledge became increasingly marginalized and demonized, and these women became popular targets of witch hunts. Witchcraft, not particularly gender biased during the medieval period, now became increasingly associated with women, and especially older women.
Kepler’s mother’s case was a typical one of petty village malice. Her accuser was another old woman, who had fallen ill after being given one of Katharina’s herbal infusions. Kepler sought to discredit this woman’s testimony and to use his influence at court to protect his mother. He wrote:
There is a case before you concerning several people accused by the court, based purely on the fanciful rantings of your dear darling housewife and sister, Ursula Reinbold. Everyone knows that until this day, this woman his lived frivolously, and now, by your own account, she has become mentally ill. Caught in the middle of this depressing web of suspicion, my own dear mother, who has lived honorably into her seventieth year, has been accused by you of giving this same crazy person some silly magic potion, which you say caused her insanity….
I want you to know that I will seek the help of my friends and mentors, and that I will gain favors from well-known and respected persons I am acquainted with. I intend to contest this matter and bring to bear the full extent of my powers until it is finally remedied in accordance with the written laws….
Johannes Kepler, copy of an original oil, 1610.
The artist Maira Kahlman, in an image based on this portrait by an unknown painter, noted that “Kepler wrote about celestial harmony, but domestic harmony eluded him. He
wrote in his diary ‘My wife is fat, confused and simpleminded.’” (Kalman’s work cannot be reproduced here because permission requests went unanswered.)
Despite Kepler’s difficult familial relations, he defended his mother vigorously when she was accused of witchcraft.
Kepler’s family background and childhood situation gave little hint that he would one day acquire the kind of clout this letter implies. His father, Heinrich, was a mercenary soldier who was by all accounts a bitter and violent man; Kepler described him as “vicious, inflexible, quarrelsome, and doomed.” When he was home he beat his wife and children, and he once tried to sell Johannes’s brother — his namesake, Heinrich — into slavery. (The younger Heinrich was a teenager at the time, so perhaps he had cause.) But he was usually off fighting some war, for whichever side offered the better price. When Kepler was a young child his mother left him in the care of his grandparents while she journeyed to the Netherlands — it cannot have been an easy trip for a woman presumably traveling alone. She was searching for her husband, who was fighting for the Duke of Alba of Catholic Spain. But ultimately she could not succeed in holding him within the circle of the family, and he drifted off to parts unknown, or perhaps was killed in battle; all contact with him was lost.
Born Katharina Guldensmann, Kepler’s mother was the daughter of an innkeeper (her husband would also make a brief attempt at running a tavern in between his mercenary excursions). In a private document, at once narcissistic and self-excoriating as was typical of him, that Kepler wrote in his mid-twenties, he described himself and his family. His mother, he said, was “small, thin, swarthy, gossiping, and quarrelsome, of a bad disposition” (from this description she seems to have been the family member whom Kepler himself most resembled, in appearance at least, and perhaps in personality). She had been raised by the aunt who would later be burned as a witch. In Kepler’s birthplace, a town of some two hundred families, thirty-eight witches were burned between 1615 and 1629. In nearby Leonberg, where his mother now lived, six witches were executed in the year that she was accused.
Katharina was nearly among them. Her trial, which would drag on until 1621, six months before her death, was among the longest in the history of the witch hunts, which reached their peak between the 1580s and the 1630s — the span of Kepler’s life. Only her son’s influence — along with her own stubborn refusal to confess — seems to have saved her (most of the accused confessed under torture, but Kepler’s success in preventing her from being tortured enabled her to hold firm).
Katharina and Ursula Reinbold, the wife of a glazier, had been companions, but they had a falling out. On one occasion, Ursula alleged, she had fallen ill after Katharina had given her a “potion.” She blamed Katharina, though others whispered that her ailments were the result of a long-ago abortion, from the time when, it was said, she had worked as a prostitute. But the Reinholds had connections with the local magistrate, and Ursula’s charges against Katharina were soon acted upon. Then more witnesses came forward to testify that they too had fallen ill after accepting a drink from the old woman; that she had caused the deaths of their children merely by touching them; that she took wild midnight rides on neighbors’ livestock; that cattle and pigs fell ill in her presence, or began to kick and tried to climb walls; that people merely passing her house would feel sudden sharp pains in their arms and legs; that she tried to seduce younger women to follow her devilish arts; that she questioned the idea of heaven, claiming that life terminated at death; that she had been known to pass through locked doors; that she attempted to make a drinking vessel out of her own father’s skull (this one was true); and many other incriminating facts.
Kepler himself had inadvertently appeared to incriminate his mother through a story he had written called The Dream (Somnium). The story, sometimes called the first science fiction based on something resembling modern science, imagined a trip to the moon. Kepler had drafted an early version during his student days at Tübingen University. He had not yet seen the work through to publication, but versions of it had circulated in manuscript. In the story a student is banished by his mother, a witch, to Denmark, where he studies with the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe (for whom Kepler himself had been an assistant). On his return she reveals that she learned the arts of witchcraft from a demon who instructed her how to travel between the earth and the moon at times of a lunar eclipse. The story began as an attempt to imagine how the universe would look from another celestial body, but, under the circumstances, the portrayal of the Kepler-like protagonist’s mother as a witch cut a little close to home.
In the early seventeenth century, before the heavens had been polluted by all the lights of modern technology, the stars and the planets were a more intimate part of daily life than they are today, when some people cannot even say what phase the moon is in — unthinkable ignorance by earlier standards. When Kepler was six, not long after his father abandoned the family for the final time, his mother led him to “a high place” to observe a famous astronomical phenomenon, the Great Comet of 1577; at age nine he was called outdoors to witness a lunar eclipse. These incidents suggest that his mother wanted to initiate him in the realm of heavenly mysteries; if so, the lesson took. Kepler, whom Carl Sagan called “the first astrophysicist and the last scientific astrologer,” remained something of a mystic throughout his career. From his first major astronomical work, The Cosmographic Mystery, through the massive Harmony of the World, on which he was working in 1616, his writings chart an indefatigable, indeed almost a desperate, search for evidence of God’s divine plan in the physical world, and especially in the heavens. “The diversity of the phenomena of nature is so great, and the treasures hidden in the heavens so rich,” he wrote, “precisely in order that the human mind shall never be lacking in fresh nourishment.” This quest to fathom the divine plan made him thirst for accurate astronomical data.
Today Kepler, despite his mystical leanings, has been claimed by science, and he occupies a prominent position in the pantheon of figures in the “scientific revolution” of the Renaissance and early modern period. His signal accomplishment, from the standpoint of science history, was his three laws of planetary motion: in brief, planets follow elliptical orbits around the sun, they move more rapidly when they are closer to the sun (technically, the radius vector of their orbits covers equal areas in equal times), and the square of their orbital periods is proportional to the cube of their mean distance from the sun. The first two laws appeared in New Astronomy in 1609, the third in The Harmony of the World, which was published in 1618. The discovery of these laws was doubly remarkable since Kepler did not have calculus as part of his mathematical arsenal (in fact, he didn’t even have decimals) and had to derive his results by arduous trial and error, using traditional geometry.
Model of the “Cosmic Cup,” by Johannes Kepler, from The Cosmographic Mystery, 1596.
On July 9, 1595, the twenty-three-year-old math teacher Johannes Kepler had a eureka moment while diagraming a problem on the blackboard for his small, bored, and restless class. In his off hours Kepler had been working on a grand aspiration: fathoming the divine order of the universe.
What determined the orbits of the six planets, Kepler wondered. (Saturn was the most distant planet then known.) He felt certain that there must be some significant relation among the sizes of the orbits. “But I could find no order either in the numerical proportions,” he lamented, “or in the deviations for such proportions.” Now, in the middle of his class, it struck him: he was working in two dimensions and needed to be working in three — the orbits must be related not to the proportions of flat forms but to the five Platonic solids.
It seemed to make sense. Why were there only six planets “and not twenty or a hundred,” Kepler asked. It had been known since ancient times that, while an infinite number of regular polygons can be constructed in two dimensions, there were only five kinds of perfect solids in which each side is identical to all the others (they are the tetrahedron or pyramid, the cub
e, the octahedron, the dodecahedron, and the icosahedron). The five solids, he suddenly realized, would fit (more or less) in the intervals between the orbits of the six planets.
This revelation was the guiding inspiration of Kepler’s life. All his subsequent astronomical work derived from it. It was, unfortunately, wrong. Kepler’s own later work with Tycho Brahe’s data proved this, but he never completely abandoned the notion that he was on the verge of decoding God’s master plan. “Seldom in history,” said the historian of science Owen Gingerich, “has so wrong a book been so seminal in directing the future course of science.”
Young Kepler was so taken with his revelation that through sheer enthusiam he managed to convince Frederick, Duke of Wuerttemberg, to construct his model of the universe in the form of a drinking cup. It would be “a true and genuine likeness of the world and model of the creation.” Each part, he advised, should be made by a different metal worker, so that the cosmic secret would not leak out. The solids, each representing a planet, would be cut with different stones: diamonds for Saturn, jacinth for Jupiter, and so on. The cup would serve various beverages: Mercury would be brandy, Mars would be Vermouth, Jupiter a white wine. The project dragged on for several years before petering out, as the royal metal workers proved unequal, finally, to the task of replicating God’s design for the universe.
He had achieved these results by working from data compiled by the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, whom he served as an assistant at Prague. Tycho had taken a position there as imperial astronomer to the eccentric Bohemian king Rudolf II, the Austrian Habsburg emperor. Rudolf had moved his court to Prague from Vienna in in 1583, and he had become a great supporter not only of science but of the arts as well; he was also deeply interested in the occult and the arcane. Some say Rudolf was mad, others that he was just deeply melancholic; certainly he was not as disturbed as his son Don Giulio Cesare, who dismembered his mistress and flung the parts out the windows of Frum-low Castle. Rudolf ruled what was called the Holy Roman Empire but was really a loose confederation of cities, duchies, and principalities mainly located in modern Austria, Germany, and central Europe. (Control of the eastern Habsburg lands had gradually ceded to Rudolf’s grandfather, Ferdinand I, from his brother Charles V of Spain in the first half of the sixteenth century, and the two branches had become became effectively autonomous.) The political and religious strains of the early seventeenth century brought the two astronomers together. Tycho had been forced to abandon his home, where he had built the most elaborate astronomical observatory up to that time, located on the island of Hven in the Oresund strait between the Swedish region of Scania and Danish Zealand. (Historically a part of Denmark, the island has been part of Sweden since the second half of the seventeenth century.) The observatory, which Tycho called Uraniborg, doubled as a research institute, housing some hundred students, scholars, and workers. King Frederick II of Denmark (whose daughter Anne would marry James and become queen of England and Scotland) had been so pleased with Tycho’s international fame that he had supported him with an amount equal to a full percent of the country’s total wealth, but after Frederick’s death in 1588, the situation changed dramatically. The new king, Christian IV, wanted to reduce the political power of the small but influential Danish aristocratic elite of which Tycho was a part; he seems also to have held some personal animus against Tycho. Tycho was forced to find a new location for his observation and a new patron; this turned out to be Rudolf of Bohemia.
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