Imagining the Heavens: Adam Elsheimer’s Flight into Egypt and the Renaissance Night Sky

Stefan Zieme

doi:10.5334/jhk.3

Abstract

Adam Elsheimer’s The Flight into Egypt (1609) has triggered a longstanding debate among art historians. For the last five decades, Elsheimer’s novel naturalistic representation of the night sky in his painting on copper has been linked to Galileo’s telescopic observations. To explain the astronomical details of this painting, scholars have contended that Elsheimer observed, before Galileo, the night sky with one of the first telescopes available in Rome. So far, the debate has lacked input from the history of astral science. This article presents a case study that examines the relationship between the visual arts and astronomical knowledge. It offers a contextualized analysis of the technical details of the artwork within the prevailing astronomical knowledge—before the appearance of Galileo’s Sidereus Nuncius—and frames it within the network of and debates among prominent figures of Galileo’s and Elsheimer’s time. It proposes a revisionist interpretation of Elsheimer’s most famous artwork based on an analysis of the technical and cultural practices of discerning and imagining the night sky around 1600.

Highlights

When Adam Elsheimer died on 11 December 1610, aged only 32 years, what was presumably his last painting, a small painting on copper titled The Flight into Egypt (Figure 1), was in his bedroom in his residence in Rome and the first painting listed on the inventory of his possessions.1 A week later, Elsheimer’s friend Johann Faber (1574–1629), a German doctor and botanist who lived in Rome, communicated Elsheimer’s untimely death to the Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640)
In Sidereus Nuncius, Galileo wrote about his pioneering observations of the Milky Way through a telescope and stated that “the Galaxy is nothing else than a congeries of innumerable stars distributed in clusters.”7 He was opposed to the Aristotelian notion of the immaculate and pristine nature of the moon and argued that the light and dark patches, visible to the naked eye, correspond to mountains and valleys on its surface
Since Cavina’s conjecture, the debate about the image has revolved around the following question: What astronomical knowledge did Elsheimer depict above the Holy Family as they pause by the waterside? To answer this question, art historians have begun to delve into the history of astronomy but have not fully exploited the vernacular ideas or the interactions between visual culture and astral belief of Elsheimer’s time

Summary

Introduction

When Adam Elsheimer died on 11 December 1610, aged only 32 years, what was presumably his last painting, a small painting on copper titled The Flight into Egypt (Figure 1), was in his bedroom in his residence in Rome and the first painting listed on the inventory of his possessions.1 A week later, Elsheimer’s friend Johann Faber (1574–1629), a German doctor and botanist who lived in Rome, communicated Elsheimer’s untimely death to the Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640).

Results

Conclusion