Copernicus' 'On the Revolutions' then entered the list of banned books and in a papal bull was issued, condemning anything that questioned the fixed nature of the earth. The shift required us to recalibrate our relationship to the stars. Astrology had been the main cosmological paradigm the world had operated in, with people looking to the skies to better understand their place on earth.
Heliocentrism has left a formidable legacy and still poses important questions for us. First, I wanted to get an expert opinion on the attribution to Murillo.
To this end, I sent a copy of the photograph of the painting to four Murillo specialists two in Spain, one in the U. They all independently responded that although it is difficult to provide conclusive opinions based on a photograph, when considering the style, subject matter and relevant historical facts, they were quite convinced that Murillo did not paint this portrait.
One said that the painter was probably not Spanish, and another suggested that the painting was from the 19th century. Motivated to continue to investigate by these unanimous, unexpected judgments, I discovered that an article about the painting appeared simultaneously in two Belgian newspapers De Halle and De Poperinghenaar on February 23, The feature reported that an important portrait of Galileo had been exhibited at Museum Vleeshuis in Antwerp, Belgium.
Inquiry at Vleeshuis revealed that on September 13, , Van Belle had indeed loaned it a painting entitled Galileo in Prison. Further inquiries uncovered the surprising fact that Stedelijk Museum Sint-Niklaas SteM Sint-Niklaas in Belgium has in its collection a painting that appears to be identical to the one loaned to Vleeshuis.
Moreover, a close inspection of the wall in front of Galileo in this painting revealed a drawing of Earth orbiting the sun, a few other drawings possibly of Saturn or the phases of Venus and the famous motto. This portrait was documented as having been painted in by the Flemish painter Romaan-Eugeen Van Maldeghem.
It was donated to the city of Sint-Niklaas by art collector Lodewijk Verstraeten. This development created a very interesting situation. There were two virtually identical paintings. One, owned by Van Belle, was claimed to have been painted in or The other, by Van Maldeghem, was painted in The Van Belle painting made its first documented public appearance in It was loaned to Vleeshuis in and was exhibited there in Since then its whereabouts have been unknown.
The second painting has been in the collection of SteM Sint-Niklaas since or To complicate things further, I discovered that in the Antwerp auction house Bernaerts Auctioneers took bids on a painting entitled Galileo in Prison. It was listed as having been painted by Flemish painter Henrij Gregoir in —the same year in which Van Maldeghem painted his portrait of Galileo with the same title.
A geocentric worldview became engrained in Christian theology, making it a doctrine of religion as much as natural philosophy. Despite that, it was a priest who brought back the idea that the Earth moves around the Sun. In , a Polish priest named Nicolaus Copernicus proposed that the Earth was a planet like Venus or Saturn, and that all planets circled the Sun.
The theory gathered few followers, and for a time, some of those who did give credence to the idea faced charges of heresy. But the evidence for a heliocentric solar system gradually mounted. When Galileo pointed his telescope into the night sky in , he saw for the first time in human history that moons orbited Jupiter. If Aristotle were right about all things orbiting Earth, then these moons could not exist. Galileo also observed the phases of Venus, which proved that the planet orbits the Sun.
At about the same time, German mathematician Johannes Kepler was publishing a series of laws that describe the orbits of the planets around the Sun. In , Isaac Newton put the final nail in the coffin for the Aristotelian, geocentric view of the Universe. While Copernicus rightly observed that the planets revolve around the Sun, it was Kepler who correctly defined their orbits.
At the age of 27, Kepler became the assistant of a wealthy astronomer, Tycho Brahe, who asked him to define the orbit of Mars. Brahe, who had his own Earth-centered model of the Universe, withheld the bulk of his observations from Kepler at least in part because he did not want Kepler to use them to prove Copernican theory correct. Using these observations, Kepler found that the orbits of the planets followed three laws. Eventually, however, Kepler noticed that an imaginary line drawn from a planet to the Sun swept out an equal area of space in equal times, regardless of where the planet was in its orbit.
For all these triangles to have the same area, the planet must move more quickly when it is near the Sun, but more slowly when it is farthest from the Sun. It was this law that inspired Newton, who came up with three laws of his own to explain why the planets move as they do.
By unifying all motion, Newton shifted the scientific perspective to a search for large, unifying patterns in nature. Law I. Every body perseveres in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a right line, unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed theron.
Consequently, the geocentric model of the solar system with the Earth placed at its centre proposed by such Greek philosophers as Plato BCE , and Aristotle — BCE became the accepted version of celestial events.
Copernicus In his seminal work, Copernicus formulated a fully predictive model of the universe in which the Earth is just another planet orbiting the Sun, but fear of being branded a heretic by the Christian Church meant that he waited until his deathbed in before publishing the book.
After Sir Isaac Newton invented the reflecting telescope in , it soon became eminently clear that the Earth was not the centre of our solar system.
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