Richard Poss

The Cosmological Compass in Western Art

Abstract

A famous painting illustrates the medieval image of God as the creator of an ordered cosmos. The frontispiece to a 13th century Bible Moralisée, now in the National Library of Austria, is a favorite in history of astronomy lectures as it enforces the notion of a theocentric universe ruled by laws of nature. There are frequent manuscript illustrations of God holding mason’s dividers, an image that becomes a symbol of the application of reason and mathematics to the world.

This paper examines the God-with-a-compass image, from its origin in Proverbs through its appearance in Dante and Petrarch, and in a multitude of works of visual art and sculpture from 10th century illuminated manuscripts to the Romantics in England. In between we will encounter medieval visionary imagery, Renaissance Humanist allegories, and Neoclassical drawing room satire.

New discoveries in astronomy change the cosmological model, and the function of the compass image evolves from Dante’s Paradiso 19 and Petrarch’s ‘Triumph of Time’ to the Humanist iconography of Durer, Lotto, and Hans Holbein the Younger. The Enlightenment period had its own uses for the image, and we see Voltaire and others use it to praise Isaac Newton as a symbol for the triumph of the new science. William Blake uses this symbol in several works and restores the image to its original power, to its spiritual potency as a symbol. Conclusions about the importance and function of this image will be presented.

Biography

Richard Poss is an Associate Professor of Astronomy, and former Director of the Humanities Program at the University of Arizona. His research examines the role of astronomical themes in European poetry, and he has published articles on Petrarch, Dante, Veronica Gambara, Walt Whitman, and on the exploration of Mars. He teaches courses on the history of astronomy and the relations between astronomy and the arts, and is a frequent instructor with the university’s Humanities Seminars program. He is co-founder of the popular lecture series 'Astrobiology and the Sacred: Implications of Life Beyond Earth', sponsored by a grant from the Templeton Foundation. He has won a variety of major university teaching awards, including the UA Foundation Leicester and Kathryn Sherrill Creative Teaching Award 1994, the Provost’s General Education Teaching Award 2001, several Humanities Seminars Superior Teaching Awards (1996, 2002 and 2008), and two Provost’s Teaching Improvement Awards (1991 and 1992).