This post was initially included on MIT Press.
This shortarticle is adjusted from Omar W. Nasim’s book “The Astronomer’s Chair: A Visual and Cultural History“.
When you close your eyes and believe of a chair, what comes to mind? You may see your dad’s preferred simple chair, the one he sank into to watch tv and which still holds the strong scent of his pipeline tobacco; the couch you were on when you veryfirst dominated “Mario Bros.”; or that unique sofa that constantly stayed covered with a sheet or plastic slipcover upuntil visitors shownup.
Yet others may see in their mind’s eye designer chairs like Le Corbusier’s chaise lounge, Charles and Ray Eames’s arm and side chairs, or the common plastic monobloc chairs banned by the city of Basel in 2008—chairs that embody emblematic styles of the 20th century, not to reference fetishized business items that continue to influence or repulse. Still others may thinkof Van Gogh’s familiar rustic wood chairs or the Iron Throne at the center of the struck series “Game of Thrones.” Whatever the case, it is clear that the chair encapsulates a lot more than just inert furnishings.
The chair is, after all, one of those unnoticeable supports, much like the flooring underneath your feet or the walls around you, that tends to fall away into the background so that you can get on with other things, like reading. But if we participatein to chairs in a organized method and take them seriously as things of historic researchstudy, they open up a entire world of significance.
As signs of stature, there are chairs in the history of science that have endupbeing renowned. These variety from Voltaire’s reading chair equipped with candlestick holder and bookrest, to Benjamin Franklin’s library chair with integrated actions, to Charles Darwin’s armchair on wheels, still on screen at his home workplace in Down House, Kent. Such antiques are housed in museums goneto by thousands every year, for whom these artifacts shimmer with a historic and cultural aura, one associated to the status of science in our contemporary societies. Think likewise of Stephen Hawking’s wheelchair, which, after the commemorated astrophysicist’s death in 2018, was atfirst idea to be bound for the Science Museum in London, however was bought at Christie’s auction home in London for $390,000 and ended up in personal hands rather. Or the corner chair made atsomepoint in the early 19th century from the wood of the famous apple tree at Woolsthorpe Manor under which Newton is stated to have sat.
At all these levels—from the ordinary to the renowned, from the physical to the symbolic, the genuine and mythic—the striking existence of chairs in the history of science pleads to be acknowledged and comprehended. As a historian of science determined by the work of cultural historians of style and furnishings, I lookedfor to checkout the significance of specialized chairs utilized by astronomers in my book “The Astronomer’s Chair.” Why astronomers? The book grew out of a curious observation. In lookinginto the functions of illustration and photography in astronomy, I observed a repeating however formerly unacknowledged theme: representations of observing chairs particularly developed for usage by astronomers at the telescope. Once I began to notification them, I saw them allover. The photos insomecases revealed an astronomer seated in a custom-made chair. At other times, the specialized chair was staged empty however alongwith other innovative instruments of an observatory.
The astronomer’s chair, too, turns out to have a long history.
At least as far back as the mid-14th century we discover a hexagonal panel relief initially crafted in the workshops of Andrea Pisano for Giotto’s Campanile in Florence. It is a panel—now in the Museo dell‘Opera del Duomo—that reveals Gionitus, the legendary creator of astronomy, seated at a desk operating a quadrant while taking notes. There is likewise the 1493 inscribed representation of the ninth-century Baghdad astronomer al-Farghānī (800/805–870 CE) seated on a bench next to a small figure of a hermit in a Latin translation of his crucial work. Albrecht Dürer’s frontispiece to “De scientia motus orbis” (1504), a Latin translation of the eighth-century Arabic huge text by the Persian-Jewish astronomer Māshā’allāh ibn Athari (740–815 CE), reveals the latter in a strange however probably specialized chair holding a world and compass.
We discover litup codices illustrating well-seated astronomers, such as the similarity of Ptolemy that embellishes the title page of “Ptolemaeus: Magna Compositio, Zierrahmen mit Tugenden und dem Wappen” (1465). Ptolemy is revealed crowned and seated like a king upon a throne while holding a compass. But amongst the most well-known representations is definitely the 1598 etching of Tycho Brahe that renders the well-known astronomer setup in the middle of his popular observatory on the island of Hven.
Besides Johannes Vermeer’s 1668 oil-on-canvas painting of “The Astronomer” or the intricate etching of the German Jesuit astronomer Christopher Clavius by E. de Boulonois, the 17th century experienced an abundance of images of astronomers with their telescopes, pre