DFG Research Project, 2025-2028

The Department of Art History

Freie Universität Berlin

Principal Investigator: PD Dr. Mateusz Kapustka

The project investigates visual dimensions of the 17^th- and 18^th-century geocentrism upon the comprehensive analysis of images, books, globes, scientific instruments, and illustrated university theses as iconic media of knowledge in representative Baroque cloister library halls, colleges, and astronomical observatories of the Habsburg Empire. Starting with the assumption that monumental fresco images served as visual directories for library book collections and signified the cluster order of scientific faculties and disciplines represented, it analyses the relation between the painted depictions of divine heaven and the geocentric order of knowledge in the library halls. Thus, the investigation aims to critically reconstruct the Baroque intertwining of scientific and religious argumentation and seeks to overcome the dichotomy between heaven and sky, which sustainably affected the art historical writing on the topic until today. The project’s transdisciplinary goal is hence to integrate the history of the hitherto frequently marginalized 17^th-18^th-century substantial debate on Earth’s universal centrality and its imagination into the very dispute on cultural media of the early modern production of knowledge, scientific evidence, and globalization in art history, visual studies, and cultural studies.

The project seeks in this way to examine a hitherto widely neglected issue in the history of art: the question of how early modern images reflected and propagated geocentrism at the very thresholds between religious iconography, astronomical observation, and scientific demonstration. In how far did the geocentric world model influence the early modern imagination of globality and, consequently, to what extent did it determine the philosophical, scientific, and social parameters of progress? Accordingly, the issue of the broad structural intertwining of early modern sciences with religious imagination will be put to a critical discussion upon the analyses of Baroque scholarly libraries as iconic spaces.

Considering that the whole Catholic world remained geocentric almost until the middle of the 18^th century, the project investigates the very intersections of sacred and scientific imagery in this respect. Therefore, the primary objects of research are diverse media of depiction and demonstration of geocentric premises in the Baroque library halls in cloisters and university colleges in the 17^th-18^th centuries. The inquiry concentrates on the representative examples of libraries in the Habsburg Empire in Austria, Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia. In this context, the cloister libraries are understood as taxonomized ‘microspaces’ of knowledge (Burke) that created the situation of scholarly enclosure and discursive presupposition for study: ceiling frescoes, bookshelf decorations, books/book orders, illustrations in astronomical treatises, and scientific instruments. In addition to this, the reconstruction of the original book inventories in astronomical observatories will deliver insights into possible discursive conditionings of telescopic observation. Finally, the investigation of highly elaborated geocentric premises provided in Baroque illustrated university theses will expose the impact of the preconditioned library reading on the visual culture of academic disputation and qualification in philosophical and theological faculties. Therefore, instead of describing libraries a priori as outstanding monuments of art history, the project aims to reconstruct the visual presuppositions of scientific practice. As the project accentuates in this way the evidentiary role of both monumental and portable media as the means of persuasion, accumulation, and acculturation, it also consequently seeks to put several aspects of the narrative of art history as an academic discipline into the discussion.

The project’s content schedule of documentation, inquiry and transdisciplinary analysis is organized along with the disposition of the historical material to be examined and refers to the historical premise of geocentrism, its practice in library reading, and its propagation through academic disputations. The project’s structure includes, therefore, three Work Areas:

1). Premise: The Persistence of Geocentrism

2). Practice: Libraries and Observatories
3). Propagation: Illustrated University Theses

According to this, instead of concentrating on the notion of geocentrism itself and the related strictly astronomical debates, the project investigates the dynamics of its assumed, fabricated, and propagated pictorial discourse with all its attestation levels in images and pictorially organized spaces of early modern science. By exposing in this way the visual dynamics of scholarly enclosure in the Baroque order of discourse (Foucault), the inquiry intends to put historical images and iconographies—both artistic and scientific—into strong relation by throwing them into their very field of the then proclaimed modernity. In this field, the project demonstrates its central thesis on how geocentric imagination, Baroque depictions of heaven, and empirical observation of the sky as well as scientific evidence of global measures were mutually interdependent in libraries as spatially orchestrated institutions of study.