WHAT SORT OF person was Copernicus? Did he like puns? Did he ever play jokes on his classmates or his fellow canons? Did he enjoy music? He probably never tasted a potato, or chocolate, or drank a cup of coffee, food that had scarcely whetted European palates in his time, but was he keen on beer, or had he developed a taste for wine in his Italian sojourn during his graduate school days?
Was he tall, dark, and handsome? Did he ever have a girlfriend? Did he like children? Alas, these are unanswerable questions. No personal memoirs exist. Of his seventeen surviving letters, fifteen deal essentially with cathedral matters, the sixteenth concerns currency reform, and the seventeenth is a long technical astronomical account, but unfortunately not dealing with his cosmology. Half a century after Copernicus' death, a professor at Cracow began assembling materials for a biography, but that story was never written and the data have been lost.
As I began my quest for copies of his book, Copernicus himself was a shadowy personality for me. His piercing eyes look out from the portrait preserved in the town hall in Toruh, his birthplace, his pupils reflecting the Gothic windows of his homeland, and his red jerkin more engaging than the drab habit of a friar. Yet he was hardly more than a cardboard figure propped up in a shop window. Among many things, during the course of my investigations these initial impressions gradually transformed into an understanding of the man and his impact.
A few weeks after my fateful trip to Edinburgh in 1970, my travels took me to Uppsala, seat of the most distinguished university in Sweden, and there the transformation began, when I first laid eyes on Copernicus' working library, the actual volumes that he had used and annotated.
The Uppsala astronomers had invited me to give several technical lectures on my own astrophysical researches. From a previous visit I knew the observatory had a magnificent library, so I made sure that my schedule included plenty of time to work my way through the shelves, book by book, handling not only great landmark volumes, such as first editions of Isaac Newton's Principia and John Napier's Logarithmia, but the many minor and often rarer works that make up the fabric of normal science. The observatory library had an outstanding showing of Kepler's titles, and, remarkably, there was even a marvelous volume that contained notes in Copernicus' own hand. On the illustrated pages of eclipse predictions in Johann Stoeffler's Calendarium Romanum magnam, Copernicus had recorded his observations made in the 1530s and early 1540s (plate lb).
That volume in the observatory library was just the tip of the iceberg as far as the Uppsala University Copernicana were concerned. A century after Copernicus' death, the library of the cathedral where Copernicus had written the principal parts of his De revolutionibus had been captured by the Swedes during the Thirty Years' War and shipped off to Scandinavia. The great majority of these books had ended up in the University Library in Uppsala, where they had been systematically ferreted out by several generations of visiting scholars from Poland. At that moment the librarian from Copernicus' hometown, Toruh, was working in the main library, and on his desk I caught my first glimpse of the Frauenburg hoard. From him I obtained a list of books that Copernicus used, which I added to my own voluminous notes on the observatory's collection.* But I did not then have the time to inspect the Copernican books.
I would twice return to Sweden in my search for Copernicus, but then I needed to head south to Copernicus' Polish homeland, to join the international committee as it finalized the plans for the forthcoming Quinquecentennial in 1973. As secretary, Jerry Ravetz guided the proceedings, reviewing the progress on a volume of studies on the reception of Copernican astronomy, and the plans for an excursion called "In the Footsteps of Copernicus."
One of three sixteenth-century copies of Copernicus' Commentariolus, preserved in a printed copy of Derevolutionibus at the Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm.
"Some of the most important things at conferences happen on the excursion buses," my friend and fellow astronomer Jerzy Dobrzycki remarked during a break in our sessions. "If it hadn't been for a conversation in a bus at the international congress here in 1965, we might never have discovered the third manuscript of Copernicus' Commentariolus."
The Commentariolus, or "Little Commentary," documented an early stage of Copernicus' work. Never printed during his lifetime, it was apparently distributed by manuscript to a few of his confidants. For a long time this document remained out of sight to Copernican scholars, and then around 1880 a Swedish scholar discovered a manuscript copy at the Academy of Sciences in Stockholm. A few years later a second manuscript turned up in the National Library in Vienna. At first it was dated to the 1530s, the decade before the publication oi De revolutionibus in 1543. Then, however, researchers found an inventory of the library of a sixteenth-century Cracow professor, one Matthew of Miechow, with an entry, "A manuscript of six leaves in which the author asserts that the Earth moves while the Sun stands still." When scholars noticed that it described the document found in Stockholm and Vienna, they realized that the Commentariolus itself had to antedate May 1514, the date of Matthew's inventory. In other words, the "Little Commentary" showed a preliminary form of Copernicus' approach to the heliocentric arrangement, dating at least thirty years before De revolutionibus was published, and it offered a different arrangement of the small secondary circles than he finally adopted in his magnum opus.
Neither the Stockholm nor the Vienna manuscript was in Copernicus' hand. They were secondary copies, and they had certain discordances, not to mention that the one in Vienna lacked several leaves. Thus, finding another early copy was a discovery of some importance, and a bus ride had provided the catalyst. During a conference excursion from Warsaw to Cracow in 1965, Dobrzycki had had a chance conversation with the Scottish scholar W. P. D. Wightman. Wightman had described some curious annotations on interleaved pages of a copy of De revolutionibus found at his home university in Aberdeen. The annotations had been made by Duncan Liddel, a sixteenth-century Scot who had taught at Rostock in northern Europe before returning to Aberdeen with a rich collection of continental books. From Wightman's partial description of the notes, Dobrzycki guessed that they might comprise another copy of the Commentariolus, a hunch that turned out to be correct. It stands as the single most significant piece of Copernican research in the 1960s.
The opportunity to discuss with Dobrzycki my own recent findings in Scotland made attendance at that 1970 committee meeting particularly memorable. He was by then rapidly becoming a key authority on Copernicus, and he listened attentively to the news about Reinhold's well-annotated copy.
"If you're going to make a survey of copies of Copernicus' book, you should consider including the second edition as well as the first," he suggested. "Duncan Liddel copied the Commentariolus into a second edition. And Tycho Brahe annotated a second edition, an important copy that's now in Prague. Since the second edition was published in 1566, long before scholars generally accepted the Copernican system, you might double your chances for finding interesting annotations by including it."
Dobrzycki didn't have to work very hard to convince me of the merits of his suggestion, because in the Uppsala observatory library I had just seen a second edition containing an early manuscript copy of Copernicus' "Letter against Werner." The letter, written by Copernicus in 1524, is tantamount to a review of a book published in Nuremberg two years earlier and written by the mathematician Johann Werner. It is a long and quite technical essay, dealing with what was then called the motion of the eighth sphere and is today called precession of the equinoxes, and it is Copernicus' only known letter that deals with astronomy—although not at all with his heliocentric cosmology. Only four other sixteenth-century copies of the letter are known. Clearly, if material of this importance was to be found in copies of the second edition of De revolutionibus, they should be examined as well.
I would have immediately taken up Dobrzycki's idea to include second editions in my survey except that time was too short in Warsaw to follow up on it. I did look at the only first edition there, at the University Library. It seemed rather anomalous that the Polish capital had only a single example of the 1543 edition, but the National Library had lost its copy of this national treasure in the wanton destruction of its collection in the closing days of World War II. In any event, the University Library copy turned out to be heavily annotated, including citations to Johannes Kepler and to the French astronomer Pierre Gassendi, so clearly the notes came from the seventeenth century. Only much later did I appreciate that major annotations seldom came singly, and eventually I found that a copy of the second edition in Toronto had marginalia closely related to those in the Warsaw copy.
I DIDN'T GET BACK to Poland until the summer of 1972. By then the quinquecentennial preparations were in their final stages, and we went through a dress rehearsal of the excursion to the Copernican locales: Lidzbark, Olsztyn, Frombork, and Torun.
Copernicus' uncle, Lucas Watzenrode, had in 1489 become bishop of Varmia, the northernmost Catholic diocese in Poland, and he provided for his nephews (Nicholas and his older brother, Andrew)* by having them appointed canons at the cathedral in Frauenburg, the religious capital of the diocese. The younger Copernicus had spent the years immediately after the appointment as a graduate student in Italy—in fact, he had actually formalized the appointment while he was in Bologna. There he had studied both civil and church law, suitable topics for a future cathedral administrator, but he consolidated his interest in the stars by rooming at the home of the professor of astronomy. During a second sojourn in Italy, right after the first, he studied medicine in Padua at the venerable university renowned for its medical instruction, but ultimately he took his doctorate in canon (or church) law at the nearby university in Ferrara.†
Following his return from Italy, from 1503 until 1510, he lived primarily with his uncle at the Bishop's Palace in Lidzbark. The tall, severely Gothic brick palace still impresses visitors. Resplendent in the sunlight, it proved to be a photogenic monument, though without the Copernican touches that we later found at Olsztyn. Still, this may well have been the setting where Copernicus made the decision to turn his back on ecclesiastical politics, to forgo the obvious opportunity to become his uncle's successor, and to turn increasingly serious attention to astronomy. In 1511 Copernicus established his primary residence in Frauenburg, but our tour stopped first in Olsztyn, twenty-five miles south of Lidzbark and fifty miles southeast of Frombork.
Copernicus lived at the Olsztyn castle for about three years, between 1516 and 1519, and was there off and on after he began a second term in 1520 as administrator of the chapter's lands in this southern part of the diocese. He had already been a member of the Varmian Cathedral Chapter for nearly twenty years when they appointed him administrator; it was one of the most important posts he held as a cathedral canon. He traveled through the chapter's estates and more than a hundred villages, collecting revenues and administering justice. But from our touristic viewpoint, his most significant accomplishment here was the construction of a reflective sundial, arranged so that the light of the Sun reflected from a small mirror traced its daily and annual paths high along the wall of the castle porch.
Varmia, the northernmost diocese in Poland, surrounded by the lands of the Teutonic knights.
The climax of our inspection tour came when we arrived in Frombork itself, the cathedral complex where Copernicus spent most of his adult life and where he wrote De revolutionibus. A monument in Polish brick Gothic, the cathedral stands within an enclosure on a bluff overlooking a bay of the Vistula River. Beginning in 1514, soon after he had written his Commentariolus, the astronomer rented quarters in a tower of the wall facing the cathedral facade. His tower stands about fifty feet high— kitchen and dining space below, a bedroom and living room in the middle, and a well-lighted workroom on the top story. From this height overlooking the cathedral and its compound, Copernicus pored over his books and manuscripts.
There were copies of De revolutionibus in Olsztyn and in Frombork, but the tight rehearsal schedule of the tour didn't allow me time to see them then. We had to hasten on, reaching Copernicus' Toruh birthplace late in the evening, and we had a brief opportunity to wander through the charming old city of Toruh after dusk had fallen. In the fading light we could see the impact the anniversary was already having on the town. Fresh paint and new construction mitigated the standard iron-curtain shabbiness. Zdenek Horsky, a colleague from Prague, observed, "It's too bad every Polish town can't have such an occasion!"
As soon as the Copernican committee finished its tour, I headed to Cracow, the historic old university town in southern Poland, where ten historians from eight countries had been invited to organize an international multivolume General History of Astronomy. The instigator of the project, Eugeniez Rybka, was a professor of astronomy there, but I had taken the lead in actually assembling an organizing committee and bringing it to Cracow.
The visit gave us an opportunity to see the old Collegium Maius where Copernicus had been an undergraduate in the 1490s. Its splendid medieval-looking classroom, with its wooden benches and frescoed geometric diagrams, conveyed the spirit of the place where Copernicus might have studied the quadrivium. The frescoes came from a later period; but despite that, I was moved by the lingering ethos of that space. And upstairs the Collegium Maius boasts a splendid collection of early brass instruments from Copernicus' lifetime, though they arrived there a few years after Copernicus had left for his graduate studies in Italy. The jewel of the collection is a brass terrestrial globe, the earliest to show America— an elegant reminder that Columbus and Vespucci were contemporaries of the young Copernicus.
Of all the Copernicana preserved in Cracow, the most precious and most significant is the actual manuscript of De revolutionibus. When Rheticus finally convinced his teacher that the manuscript should be published, a copy was made for the printer while Copernicus himself retained the original working document, the one in which he had frequently sliced out obsolete pages and replaced them with new ones. Copernicus must have continued working with the manuscript, because an errata sheet was issued with the printed book, and the same errors are marked in his hand in the manuscript. A reasonable explanation for this would be that Copernicus read the proof sheets of the book, and when he caught errors there he went back to his manuscript and corrected them on the master copy.
After Copernicus' death, the original manuscript was conveyed to Rheticus, and after he died in 1574, it was inherited by his student Valentin Otto. A century later the manuscript came into the hands of the famous Danzig observer Johannes Hevelius, but after that it dropped out of sight until 1840, when Copernican scholars became aware of its existence in a private library in Prague. After World War II, this treasure was lent by Czechoslovakia to Poland, at which time the Poles simply appropriated it for themselves and deposited it in the Jagiellonian Library of Copernicus' alma mater. It would have been unseemly for one communist society to object too strenuously to a bordering brother society, so the precious document has remained in Poland.
Copernicus' holograph manuscript for De revolutionibus, photographed by Charles Eames in the Jagiellonian Library in Cracow.
As part of the cultural enrichment for the General History committee, we all paid a visit to the manuscript department of the Jagiellonian Library, where we carefully compared the manuscript with the facsimile that had just been issued by the Copernicus Commission of the Polish Academy of Sciences. The facsimile came in a normal library form, and also in a deluxe edition with a replica of the actual binding and ragged edges to the pages, each hand-cut to match the original manuscript sheets. This latter form of the facsimile was so authentic looking that on a later occasion several of my colleagues were momentarily fooled when they saw it exhibited in a museum case.*
Joining our group of historians, who had come to look at the original manuscript of De revolutionibus, was the designer Charles Eames, camera in hand. I had first met Eames at a lunch in the Harvard Faculty Club. At the time I knew only that he was the designer of the famous Eames chair with its tall molded plywood, black leather cushions, and accompanying five-footed ottoman footrest. During the lunch I quickly discovered that he had designed the multiscreen show for the IBM pavilion at the 1964 New York World's Fair. Shortly thereafter I began consulting with Eames for an IBM exhibition on the history of computers, an assignment that frequently took me to his design shop in Venice, California. A year or two after the computer history wall was completed for the IBM headquarters in New York City, I suggested to him that he should design something for the forthcoming Copernican anniversary. Eames swiftly agreed and persuaded his IBM patrons to put on a Copernican exhibition in their Madison Avenue display room, which is what brought him to Cracow.
After the General History organizing meeting was over, I joined Eames for a photographic excursion through that ancient university town. His perceptive eye caught the textures of wood and stone around the old market square and St. Mary's Church with its majestic carved altarpiece, the masterpiece of the sixteenth-century Schwabian woodcarver Veit Stoss (or Wit Stwosz as the Poles regard him)—a treasure that had just been installed when Copernicus arrived in Cracow as an undergraduate. By and by, Eames remarked that he would like to return to the library to photograph some details of Copernicus' manuscript. I was not at all sure that we could get permission, especially because it was technically vacation time at the library, but I was willing to try.
"How many pictures does he want to take?" a long-faced manuscript librarian asked me. Knowing Charles' professional approach to photography and that he was apt to shoot three or four rolls if given a chance, I was cagey. "About ten openings," I replied with a certain amount of apprehension. That would give him an unlimited number of exposures of a selected number of pages.
With permission granted, I selected seven openings to be shot, starting with the famous heliocentric diagram, and Charles came in and set up his master-and-slave flash unit, which had no connecting wires. The librarians were so intrigued by this technological magic that they hardly noticed when he took nearly two hundred frames of the seven openings, and they even suggested another page, where Copernicus had left an inky thumbprint in the margin.
The next morning we started out at the crack of dawn, cameras in hand, for a few final hours of filming in Cracow. Then, after the morning shoot, we packed ourselves up for a trip to see Copernicus' library in Uppsala, which I had already fleetingly glimpsed on my trip to Sweden a year and a half earlier. I'll never forget Eames's astonishment when we arrived at the Arlanda airport north of Stockholm. Looking around at the waiting room, he said, with both surprise and obvious pleasure, "These are all our chairs!"
I had come to Sweden armed with the results of the Polish researchers, namely, a list of the shelf marks identifying the Frauenburg cathedral's volumes. At the University Library it took me the better part of a morning just to fill out all the call slips so that the books Copernicus actually owned or used could be fetched from their scattered locations.
It's hard to recreate the awe and tingle of excitement I felt when at last I had the assembled array in hand. Here was Copernicus' copy of Ptolemy's Almagest, and there were the tables he had had bound in Cracow, with a scattering of his working notes, faint hints about his creative process. And here was his Greek dictionary, with his name in Greek penned on the flyleaf. Copernicus had bought the volume while a graduate student in Italy around 1500, and he used it to translate the "rustic, moral and amatory" letters of an obscure Byzantine epistolographer, one Theophylactus Simocatta. This printed book, now extremely rare, was published in Cracow in 1509. Modern scholars have criticized Copernicus for a fairly pedestrian approach strongly limited by the inadequacy of his dictionary; his effort scarcely stands comparison with the eminent Italian translators. But from another viewpoint, it was one of the first such attempts at translation in the transalpine world, where the humanistic Renaissance had come more slowly.
Most thrilling of all were the three folios, uniformly bound in white pigskin, brought and signed over to "my teacher, Copernicus" by the young itinerant astronomer Georg Joachim Rheticus (plate 4a). Here was the Greek edition of Ptolemy's Almagest that had been recently published in Basel, but perhaps even more cunningly, there were three books published by Johannes Petreius in Nuremberg. A vision of Rheticus as publisher's agent sprang into mind. Often publishers' representatives had called at my office, bringing samples of their wares in the hopes that I might sign up as a textbook author. It took no great leap of imagination to see Rheticus handing over the handsome volumes of Regiomontanus' De triangulis, Apianus' Instrumentum primi mobilis, and Witelo's Optika, all beautifully crafted in Nuremberg, with the not-so-subtle implication that Petreius' press would be exactly the right place for Copernicus' own work to be printed.
Eames and I took the books into an open reading room and lined them up on a long table. Occasional patches of softly filtered sunlight highlighted the row of volumes. We worked intently with our Nikons, capturing the textures and patterns of those fifteenth- and sixteenth-century treasures. They are probably the best photographs ever made for recording the spirit of that evocative collection (plates 5a and 5b).
Working with these books was for me the climax of a ten-day metamorphosis that transformed my mental picture of Copernicus from a vague, dark, medieval figure to a three-dimensional human being. Was it seeing the room and parapets at the Frombork cathedral where the astronomer had lived and studied that made Copernicus come alive? Or the classroom in Cracow's Collegium Maius? Was it the vision of the young Rheticus with his gift of books gently cajoling the aging and reluctant old master into publishing his work? Or was it the manuscript notes tucked here and there in his books of astronomical tables, precious hints concerning the almost lost trail to heliocentrism?
In any event, reassembling his library in Uppsala and placing his books in the reading room's flickering sunlight at last convinced me, at a visceral level, that Copernicus really had existed, flesh and blood. I no longer had any trouble envisioning him as a real personality who had lived, dreamed, and even burned the midnight oil as he sweated over his geometry and his calculations. These very tomes sat on his desk as he struggled, pen in hand, to penetrate their ancient wisdom—knowledge that was to become the foundation for his reformation of astronomy.
I N THE MONTHS that followed I made repeated trips to the Eames office in Venice, California, to plan for the quinquecentennial exhibition that Charles would set up in the street-floor lobby of the IBM headquarters in New York City. Even pedestrians on Madison Avenue could at least partially view the labyrinth of Copernican panels that Charles and his assistants envisioned.
"It would be nice to include some original artifacts," he remarked on one of my visits, and by very early the next morning, before the staff had arrived (for I was still on eastern time), I had arranged to borrow a large astrolabe, a sixteenth-century brass sundial bowl, a first-edition De revolutionibus, and even one of the five copies of the 1540 Narratio prima in the United States.* I agreed to lend a few of my own books as well, recognizing that they projected a kind of verisimilitude and connectivity that bridged the centuries. "Using Xerox copies is like kissing your wife through a pane of glass" is the way one of my colleagues expressed it.
There is a palpable linkage to the Renaissance itself when handling these antique books, and especially when a scholar from ages past has added his own impressions in the margins.
The nave of the Frombork (Frauenburg)
cathedral, photographed by Charles
Eames for the IBM Copernican
quinquecentennial exhibition.
Besides the artifacts, Eames was keen to convey the Copernican environment through richly textured photographs, and he realized that Frombork was missing from his repertoire. So he was determined to return to Poland, to photograph the northern countryside in the ambered light of autumn. "If you're going to the cathedral," the staff and I implored him, "you've got to get a good tall picture of its nave." So Charles flew off to Warsaw, hired a car and driver, and went photographing in northern Poland. He visited Toruh and took a beautiful photograph of the Copernican portrait that hangs in the Town Hall (plate 3). And I especially admired his image of the Frombork cathedral nave—he took along a special architect's camera just so that he could get an undistorted view of the high Gothic arches.
But I admired even more what Eames achieved on the flight back home. He began thinking very hard about how the Copernican Sun-centered model for planetary motions differed from the traditional Ptolemaic Earth-centered scheme. Each arrangement required two circles to explain the motion of Mars as seen from the Earth. In the Copernican model the Earth's orbit and Mars's orbit each circled the Sun. But in the geocentric setup the Earth was at rest in the center, with a large deferent circle (i.e., the carrying circle) going around it. The second circle (called the epicycle) contained the planet Mars and rode on the deferent. Charles knew that each arrangement had to give the same results because each system had to represent the same observations, and he wanted to make a dynamic model to show it. By the time he flew into Los Angeles, he had the device all sketched out, complete with the behind-the-scenes linkages (accomplished with bicycle chains). The front face of his model looked like this, with the straight rods representing the observational line of sight from the Earth to Mars in each arrangement:
Ptolemy's Geocentric System
Copernicus' Heliocentric System
When he got to Venice, he turned the plans over to his shop technician, and a few days later he had a working model. In the exhibition, which opened in December of 1972, the Eames machine ran continuously without default for something like six months (plate la). As the circles turned, the rods, representing the observed line of sight to Mars, always remained parallel. Each time Mars came on the inner side of the epicycle, the combined counterclockwise motions of the deferent and epicycle caused the geocentric rod to briefly swing clockwise, the so-called retrograde motion. Whenever that happened, in the heliocentric model the faster-moving Earth was always nearest Mars and bypassing it, so the heliocentric rod remained in perfect tandem with the geocentric rod. It was a brilliant demonstration of the equivalence of the two systems, and what worked for Mars would work for each of the other planets. Over the years several of my students managed to simulate Eames' model on their computer screens, but no one was ever able to figure out how to do it with bicycle chains.
* The Frauenburg cathedral library must have owned a copy of Copernicus' De revolutionibus, but no such copy has been located.
* The Latin spellings of their names are Nicolaus and Andreas. I generally refer to the astronomer as Nicolaus except when discussing his adolescent and student days.
† Scholars speculate that frugal Copernicus took his degree at Ferrara, where he had not actually studied, because he knew no one there and hence was spared the expenses of a lavish graduation party.
* Some years after the Copernican Quinquecentennial I got an earnest phone call from a Chicago book dealer asking for an evaluation of the deluxe facsimile, which was by then out of prinr and worth some hundreds of dollars. It didn't take long for me to guess what had happened. A well-meaning but relatively unsophisticated Polish-American citizen of Chicago was presenting a facsimile to the Adler Planetarium, and he wanted to take a tax deduction. The only problem was that he thought he was giving the planetarium Copernicus' original manuscript.
* The University of Louisville generously lent its Narratio prima. The other four American copies of rhis edition were at Harvard, Yale, the Burndy Library (now the Smithsonian's Dibner Library), and in the private collection of Robert Honeyman in California. Since that time the Honeyman copy has been auctioned and has become the only located copy in Italy. Meanwhile rwo previously unrecorded copies have come to America, one to a private collection and one to the Linda Hall Library in Kansas City.