At the front of the green octagonal table in the Linder Gallery, very prominently positioned in the painting, is a scrap of paper bearing three competing systems of the universe: the Ptolemaic earth-centred system at the top left, the sun-centred Copernican system (prohibited by the Inquisition since 1616) and the compromise system of the Danish astronomer, Kepler’s mentor Tycho Brahe, …
Muzio Oddi and the Linder Gallery
The sole surviving piece of textual evidence that sheds light on the Linder gallery interior is a letter, sent on 28 March 1629, from the architect-engineer Giovanni Battista Caravaggio to his former tutor in mathematics, Mutio Oddi of Urbino. In the letter, Caravaggio (then in Milan) mentions a visit to their friend Pieter Linder, a German merchant who had also …