Tycho and Kepler

by Kitty Ferguson

  It was at about the time that Kepler left Latin school to enter Adelberg that he first became aware of a potentially explosive rift in the Protestant world. He heard a sermon in Leonberg given by a young deacon who spoke vehemently and at length against the Calvinists. Twelve-year-old Kepler went away deeply worried about this harsh controversy between those who adhered to slightly different confessions of the same faith. At the age of thirteen, he wrote a letter requesting that the University of Tübingen send him copies of Martin Luther’s disputations. Kepler decided to make it a practice, whenever he heard a preacher or lecturer argue about the meaning of the Scriptures, to consult the passages himself rather than to take anyone’s word for what they meant. He usually decided that both interpretations had good points. This was not a healthy attitude for a young man who was hoping someday to find himself in a Lutheran pulpit—indeed for anyone wanting to survive unscathed in the political/religious milieu of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Rather than win friends in both camps, it was likely to make enemies all round. As Kepler recalled his youthful inclination to see all sides of an argument: “There was nothing I could state8 that I could not also contradict.” It was a gift, and sometimes a curse, that would remain with him all his life.

  7

  A PALACE OBSERVATORY

  1578–1585

  IN THE LATE 1570s and early 1580s, Tycho Brahe’s fortunes continued to soar. The long-promised, prestigious canonry at Roskilde Cathedral and the incomes from the endowment from the Chapel of the Magi there were finally Tycho’s when the incumbent canon died. The Chapel of the Magi was no ordinary chapel. It was and still is one of the most lavishly decorated in Denmark, housing a tomb, then under construction, for King Frederick’s father, Christian III.

  Though the earlier agreement had been that when Tycho received the canonry he would relinquish the fief of Nordfjord in Norway, he successfully appealed to the king to allow him to keep both, giving him a higher total income than any other scholar in Europe. King Frederick was setting a new standard of royal support for scientific research. He was also spoiling his young favorite, who was learning to think of himself as the equal of kings and to assume that his priorities would always be clearly recognized as the priorities of the kingdom.

  Tycho’s grandiose dreams for the island of Hven were becoming a reality. On the plot so carefully and symmetrically laid out at the center of the island, a magical structure was rising. Even though Tycho and his family would not occupy the house for another eighteen months and he wouldn’t declare the building complete until the autumn of 1581, in July 1579 Tycho sent messages to his friends Vedel and Dançey that it would be well worth their while to pay a visit. There was ornamentation still to be done on the exterior of the house, and inside only the framing was finished, but the grounds were laid out according to plan, and it was possible to see the shape of things to come. Kirsten lived in temporary quarters on Hven that summer, and it was there that she gave birth to another daughter, Elisabeth.

  “House” hardly sufficed to describe the magnificent vision that confronted Vedel and Dançey on the old common lands of Hven. In its geometric extravagance, Tycho’s design rivaled Ptolemy’s scheme of the cosmos. An earthwork wall surfaced with stone (built up of earth the peasants had dug to make the fish ponds) surrounded an 839-foot-square area. The plot enclosed by the wall formed a compass (see color plate section), with four avenues leading from the compass points to the center where the mansion stood. One of these avenues ran from the house to a two-story gatehouse at the east corner. An identical gatehouse mirrored it at the west corner. Later, kennels perched above these gates would house English mastiffs to announce the approach of visitors and frighten off intruders. The servants’ quarters were at the north corner of the compound, and Tycho’s printing establishment would later be situated at the south corner, with both buildings designed as miniatures of the main house.

  Inside the earthwork wall were fruit-bearing and ornamental trees, eventually three hundred of them, each one a different variety. This orchard/arboretum enclosed another inner square, set off by a low wooden fence, with geometrically laid out beds for a botanical garden of flowers and herbs—as many interesting and exotic examples as could be brought to Hven. Wooden fencing also lined the four avenues and a central circle where the house stood facing east.

  It was a palace like no other in the world, a whimsical bauble with carved sandstone ornamentation and a remarkable roofline noticeably lacking castle turrets or crenellation (see here). Crowning the building instead was a large pavilion with clock faces on its east and west fronts. At the roof peak, sixty-two feet off the ground, a smaller cupola housed the clock chimes. Two cone-shaped wooden roofs flanked this central block. They were the roofs of Tycho’s primary observatories and were connected by galleries to smaller, similarly roofed projections in a hen-and-chicks arrangement. Pyramids, spires, dome, cupola, chimneys, galleries, and other fantastical decorations suggested more an illustration from a northern fairy tale than a Palladian villa. The appearance of Tycho’s castle cannot have failed to reinforce the image the peasants had of him as a golden-nosed wizard brooding over their island, robbing them of their freedom, and performing strange incantations, experiments, and transmutations in his subterranean alchemical laboratory.

  However, in addition to the underlying harmonic rationality of the design, there was other method in this architectural madness, and practicality rather than whimsy necessitated much of what Tycho and Steenwinkel built. The galleries made the primary and secondary observatories accessible to one another making it unnecessary to descend to the floor below. The chimneys ventilated no fewer than fourteen fireplaces and sixteen alchemical furnaces. The weather vane that topped it all off—a golden Pegasus—was connected with a mechanism so that the wind direction could be read from inside the house. The triangular panels of the cone-shaped observatory roofs could be removed individually to allow Tycho and his assistants to study one part of the sky or another.

  Finally, in the early winter of 1580–81, Kirsten had a house to which she could “keep the keys.” More than the immediate family moved in, for the building combined observatory, alchemical laboratory, and spacious family living areas, and also provided quarters for students and assistants. What Tycho had created was not only a self-sufficient manor of the sort that nobles had been building and fortifying since Roman times, not only a mansion that incorporated the architectural and aesthetic principles of the high Renaissance, but also something that could operate like a university professor’s boarding house.

  Tycho had woodcuts made of Uraniborg, including a floor plan, and wrote a description of what the house was like inside, all of which he later included in his sumptuous book Astronomiae Instauratae Mechanica. His floor plan showed a large room on the ground floor, which he marked D, that he indicated became the center of both family and scholarly life, where most of the dining and talking and even some of the research took place. In the summer, the focus of activity moved to a room on the floor above, with west-facing windows. In the first years, a corridor from the entry on the ground floor led through to the middle of the house. There, at the geometric center of Uraniborg, stood the remarkable fountain designed and engineered by Laubenwolf, with a rotating, hydraulically run figure that sprayed water into the air in all directions as it turned. Not only was it beautiful, but it also called attention to a feature of the house—running water—that even Tycho’s contemporaries Queen Elizabeth I of England and Henry III of France could not boast of having at Hampton Court and the Louvre.

  Sometime later, the wall between the entrance corridor and the room Tycho indicated as D was knocked out, so that the entry steps led directly into “the winter dining room1 or the heating installation.” Since fourteen rooms had hearths and chimneys, Tycho probably meant that there was always a warm fire burning here in a huge tile stove, keeping it fairly comfortable for him, his students, guests, and assistants to read and study, even in a bitte
r Danish winter. The roomfn1 was probably wood-paneled with a beamed ceiling, its walls hung with paintings and shelves for books. Kirsten and their children joined Tycho and his scholarly retinue here to eat the long meals that fused the ceremonial dining habits of the Danish nobility and a mealtime atmosphere more characteristic of a professor’s household.

  Figure 7.1: Tycho’s floor-plan drawing for Uraniborg, from Astronomiae Instauratae Mechanica.

  According to custom, a great oak table would have been placed so that Tycho and Kirsten (seated on the “high seat” in the middle of one side of this “high table”) were flanked by their children, Tycho’s assistants, and their guests—all arranged in order of rank. Those of less importance sat on benches along the walls on either side, with tables set before them too, leaving the fourth side of the room open for serving and for entertainers, who included a jester but often were the students, assistants, and guests themselves.

  Though no record of a typical menu survives from Uraniborg, there is no reason to think that Tycho ate any less well than his Brahe relatives. The menu in another Brahe castle for a single meal included a first course of soup, carp, pike with turnips, venison with currant sauce, chicken pâté, goose liver with cucumbers, sugar cakes, and beef with horseradish; the second course was crabs and roast lamb with beets, followed by an almond sweet and a tart. It took time to eat a meal like this, with each course possibly lasting an hour or more, but it meant that once a day, for all his years at Uraniborg, Tycho had his staff and visiting scholars together for lengthy discussion of the work they were doing, as well as for enjoyment of one another’s ideas, songs, stories, and theatrical skits.

  Tycho and Kirsten probably often slept in this same room in winter. It was not the practice among those who lived in such castles in Denmark to have specified “bedrooms.” Beds were portable.2 When the family were ready to retire, they told the servants where the beds should be set up, and it was done.

  Across the corridor, in a room Tycho marked E on his floor plan, there was a large section on the south end of the west wall where Tycho would soon erect his magnificent “mural quadrant,” and Steenwinkel would draw the architectural portions of the mural. F and G were guest chambers with, in Tycho’s words, “desks for the collaborators.”3 T, a circular library, would house Tycho’s three thousand books and his great globe. The globe was important enough to rate its own designation as W on the plan. Above the library and reached by a staircase off the south wall of the room was the south observatory with its removable roof panels. Below the library by the same staircase was the subterranean alchemical laboratory, with sixteen furnaces of nine different kinds. Four of them were visible in niches around the walls in Tycho’s elevation drawing (see color plate section). Later, Tycho moved some of his alchemical work even more into the heart of the house. He installed five furnaces in the dining room itself so that it was possible to keep an eye on lengthy distillation processes without having repeatedly to interrupt a meal to traipse down the basement stairs. The smells of alchemy mingled with the smells of the food.

  The basement level extended a few feet beyond the rest of the house in all directions, and its windows were aboveground. In addition to the laboratory, it housed pantries, a wine cellar, a salt cellar, a wood cellar, and the deep well that supplied water for the water system. At the opposite end of the basement from the laboratory, another staircase led up to the ground-floor kitchens that balanced the library in the symmetrical plan of the house. So integrated into that plan were the kitchens (balancing the library, no less) that this may have been Kirsten’s domain rather than an area for servants only.

  On the floor above the ground floor, the central block consisted of more living accommodations. Looking toward the east were the “red” and “blue” chambers and a “yellow octagonal chamber” between them. Here was the Queen’s Chamber, which Queen Sophie occupied when she visited, and the King’s Chamber—though the king never stayed the night. The west half of the second floor was taken up by the fifteen-yard-long “summer dining room”; Tycho called it the “green room” because the ceiling was painted with pictures of plants. The windows looked over the great west wall to the Øresund and gave a view in the distance of ships passing through the tollgate at Elsinore. The areas above the library and the kitchens were the observatories whose roof panels could be opened and in which Tycho’s instruments stood like fabulous sculptural masterpieces. There were galleries connecting the main observatories with the satellite observatories supported by single pillars (see here).

  What the interior of the central block was like above this floor is less clear. Another flight of stairs spiraled upward. If it was a large open spiral leading up into the dome and the pavilion at the top of the house, the dome would have served as a skylight and ventilator, and a clock face in the ceiling would have been visible from far below. This clock face registered not only the time but also the wind direction from the weather vane outside. Certainly there was a gallery around the wall at the top of the staircase, for Tycho wrote of having a “free view in all directions” from there. There was another gallery outside “on the top of the house itself,” the arches of which are visible just under the cupola on Tycho’s elevation drawing (see color plate section).

  Between the second floor and the dome itself, probably accessed by the same spiral staircase, was an area Tycho dubbed “the upper story” or “the very top of the house, where round windows [on either side of the entrance tower] are visible [on Tycho’s elevation drawing] with eight unheated bedrooms for the collaborators.” The warm dining room below was a haven indeed. One of the marvels of Uraniborg was the system Tycho had for communicating with the attic chambers. Cords within the walls ran to small bells in each of the rooms to allow Tycho to summon individual students. Tycho enhanced his image as a magician by demonstrating this system for guests. He would whisper a student’s name, and that student would immediately walk through the door as if called by magic through the walls and thin air. Tycho had in fact pulled a cord without his visitor’s noticing, then waited until he knew the student must be nearing the door before whispering his name.

  Tycho kept a record of the visitors to Hven in his meteorological diary. It was an illustrious procession of nobles and their wives, scholars, and royalty who came to his island and his remarkable home to be wined, dined, entertained, and amused by the communication system and the revolving fountain, to take the air in his gardens, and to compose love poems and heroic verses for one another in Danish and Latin.fn2 Nor was all this accomplished in an atmosphere of sobriety. A letter from Tycho to Bartholomew Schultz—evidently written at the dining table—reported that he and his companions were drinking “one mug after the other,4 filled to the brim” and exclaimed that such drinking “to the very dregs” was a learned art in itself, though what they were drinking was “not philosophical and least of all theological.” “We dedicate these toasts to you to the sound of trumpets, recorders and lutes, and with the sound of sweet song,” he told Schultz.

  As the years passed, the interior of the house became increasingly elegant in decorative detail and furnishings, and the gardens sprouted not only exotic trees and plants but also aviaries and gazebos. Tycho’s goal was to create the Renaissance ideal of Eden, but unlike many of his noble peers, who also cultivated imported fruit trees, herbs, freshwater fish in ponds, game birds, and animals, he was more than a collector for collection’s sake. He was genuinely interested in the study of plants, animals, and birds.

  Beyond the earthwork wall an odd collection of facilities sprang up—a paper mill, an instrument works, and later a partly subterranean observatory. The Uraniborg complex, supported by the rest of Hven and Tycho’s other fiefdoms in Denmark and Norway, was like no other castle or stronghold of its time. Nevertheless, it fulfilled admirably the concept of manorial self-sufficiency, with Tycho’s definition of it including much that the majority of European aristocracy would not have thought essential.

  Marring this ha
lcyon vision was the continued unhappiness of the villagers of Tuna. The king’s reply to Tycho’s complaint in 1578 had been a defeat for them. They were well informed enough, however, to know that they also could appeal to the king. In the summer of 1580 they did, charging Tycho with demanding “harmful, uncustomary5 burdens of boon work, cartage, and other labor.” The family’s move into the house required much heavy lifting, and with land under cultivation for Tycho in addition to their own fields, the peasants were doing his plowing, sowing, reaping, and threshing as well as their own. The heating and chemical ovens were insatiable consumers of the wood that had to be hauled across the sound.

  Such complaints were not ignored. Tycho made a formal reply. A commission visited Hven and then took more than a year to study its findings and reach a decision. The outcome was an even worse one for the villagers. A new charter issued by the king and his ministers laid down in precise detail what their obligations were to Tycho and what his were to them. It established once and for all that the peasants of Hven were crown tenants, not freeholders. Tradition and possession without written charters and deeds had proved valueless. The new charter decreed that the villagers even had to pay Tycho a fee to graze their swine on the acorns in Tycho’s forests in Skåne or else give him the next-to-best swine when they brought the herd back to Hven. Such a fee was customary elsewhere, but no one had ever collected it from these islanders.