Squaring the Circle: The Telescopic View in Early Modern Landscapes

Abstract

It was Galileo Galilei's celestial observations published in Starry Messenger of 1610 that made the telescope famous, but the device was more commonly used in the seventeenth century for terrestrial viewing. For this reason and thanks to a shared capacity to bring far away things clese, the telescope and the ggenre of landscape are intimately related in ways that have not been fully worked out. Beginning with Jan Brueghel the Elder's Landscape with a View of Mariemont Castle (c. 1609), which contains one of the first depictions of a telescope, this essay describes how the genre was shaped, already in the sixteenth century -before the invection of the telescope proper- by fantasies of telescopy and, then, in turn, during the seventeenth century, by the reality of telescopic vision. THe roundel format, I argue, was the clearest marker of this shaping.