Paintings of Space: From Elsheimer's Milky Way to Webb

Elsheimer's Flight into Egypt: the Milky Way as stars

Elsheimer painted small, on copper plates, for the extra glow the metal gives oil paint. The Flight into Egypt was one of the last things he made. He died in Rome in December 1610, at thirty-two, and the inventory of his house found the painting hanging in his bedroom. It belongs to the Alte Pinakothek in Munich now.

There's light in five places. The moon, low on the right. Its reflection in the lake. The shepherds' fire on the far left, where the family is heading. The torch in Joseph's hand that lights Mary and the child. And the stars, with the Milky Way running corner to corner over the trees, its diagonal echoing the dark edge of the wood below it.

Put the light on the fire and the sparks lift off it in a column and scatter into the dark above the trees, the same size as the stars. Put it on the moon and it isn't a clean white disc. Elsheimer painted it mottled, with darker patches across its face. The astronomer Michael Mendillo says it has “more than a mere hint of the light and dark markings that Galileo would publish in Sidereus Nuncius in 1610.”

Did Elsheimer use a telescope?

This little painting has been carrying an argument for fifty years. Galileo published the first book of telescope observations, Sidereus Nuncius, in Venice on 13 March 1610, with a moon full of mountains and a Milky Way made of stars, and Elsheimer's painting from 1609 seems to already know both.

The link to Galileo goes back to Anna Ottani Cavina, in The Burlington Magazine in 1976, and from it grew the argument that Elsheimer had looked through a telescope himself. In 2005 Gerhard Hartl and Christian Sicka ran the sky backwards on a computer and reported: “On 16 June 1609, at around 9.45 PM, we found that the moon and the Milky Way would be in the position shown by Elsheimer.” A plaque in San Lorenzo in Lucina, the church in Rome where he is buried, reads: “In 1609 he depicted the starry sky, observing it with one of the first telescopes.” The Alte Pinakothek's own text says the sky is based on observations by Galileo and Federico Cesi with the telescope that had just been invented.

The case against is just as serious. Keith Andrews, the leading scholar of Elsheimer's work, put it in one line in 1977: “In short, what Elsheimer intended to convey was an evocation, not observable scientific facts.” Mendillo points out that on a night with a full moon you see very few stars, and that Elsheimer's star groups only loosely match the real constellations. In 2021 the historian Stefan Zieme showed that a Milky Way made of single stars was already in print before any telescope, drawn as a circle of individual stars in Hugo Grotius's 1600 Leiden edition of the ancient star poem of Aratus. Zieme also notes that telescopes built to Lipperhey's first Dutch design magnified only about three times.

Even Hartl and Sicka stopped short of a telescope. In Julian Bell's account in The New York Review of Books, they “discerned a feat of imaginative distillation rather than of point-for-point accuracy,” and his own conclusion is that “it was a telescope of memory, not of brass and glass, that Elsheimer used.” Either way the copper holds a summer sky with the moon and the Milky Way where they could have been.

Galileo's Moon drawings and Cigoli's Moon

In November and December 1609 Galileo pointed a telescope at the moon and painted what he saw, six watercolours on a single sheet that is now in the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale in Florence. They're painted in brown, quick and wet, the moon at different phases with the line between day and night broken into spots of light. What they showed went into the book: the moon “does not possess a smooth and polished surface, but one rough and uneven, and, just like the face of the Earth itself, is everywhere full of vast protuberances, deep chasms, and sinuosities.”

The Milky Way got one short passage. Galileo wrote that the telescope ended disputes that had “tormented philosophers through so many ages,” because “the Galaxy is nothing else but a mass of innumerable stars planted together in clusters.”

A painter put Galileo's moon in a church almost at once. Lodovico Cigoli, a friend of Galileo's, painted the dome of the Pauline Chapel in Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome between 1610 and 1612, the Virgin standing on the moon as in the Book of Revelation. The moon under her feet is pockmarked with craters. In 1612 Federico Cesi, who founded the Accademia dei Lincei, wrote to Galileo that Cigoli had painted the moon the way Galileo had discovered it, with its notched edge of light and its little islands.

The Origin of the Milky Way: Tintoretto and Rubens

The name is older than any of this. The Greeks called the band galaxias kyklos, the milky circle, from gala, milk, which is where the word galaxy comes from. The story behind the name is in two of the best-known paintings of the Milky Way, and neither has a telescope anywhere near it.

Tintoretto painted it in Venice around 1575. Jupiter put his mortal son Hercules to the breast of the sleeping goddess Juno to make him immortal, and she woke. In the National Gallery's telling, “The milk which spurted upwards formed the Milky Way, while that which fell downwards gave rise to lilies.” Little gold stars scatter across the sky by Juno's raised hand. The lilies are gone: the canvas was cut down by about a third.

Jacopo Tintoretto, The Origin of the Milky Way, about 1575, oil on canvas, 149.4 × 168 cm. The National Gallery, London, NG1313. Public domain.Peter Paul Rubens, The Birth of the Milky Way, about 1637, oil on canvas, 181 × 244 cm. Museo del Prado, Madrid, P001668. Public domain.

Rubens painted it around 1637 for Philip IV's Torre de la Parada, with Juno seated on a cloud and a fine jet of milk arcing away to the right and breaking up into points of light. Rubens had known Elsheimer in Rome, and in January 1611, weeks after Elsheimer died, he wrote to the collector Johann Faber about the 300 scudi the widow was asking for the Flight into Egypt. Of all the painters here he's the one who had seen both skies, the myth and the stars.

Donato Creti's Astronomical Observations (1711)

A century after Galileo, a painter in Bologna painted the planets for a pope. Count Luigi Marsili commissioned eight small canvases from Donato Creti in 1711, and gave them to Clement XI to persuade him that the Church needed an astronomical observatory. The astronomer Eustachio Manfredi advised Creti and showed him what the planets looked like through a telescope. Clement agreed, and Bologna got its observatory. The paintings are in the Vatican Museums.

1. Saturn, one of eight

   The set runs the Sun, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and a comet, every planet anyone knew of in 1711. Each one hangs in a night sky over a landscape, with small figures below.

2. Saturn and its ring

   A pale gold ball with a thin ring around it, high in a cloudy sky. In 1610 Galileo's telescope showed Saturn “as if in three parts, with ‘ears’.” In 1659 Christiaan Huygens published the answer, a ring around the planet, tilted, so that it changes as the Earth moves. Creti paints the answer.

3. A telescope in the grass

   A seated figure in an ochre coat aims a short telescope at the sky. A sheet of paper lies on the path beside him.

4. The pointer

   Further along the path, men in eighteenth-century coats gather by a tall mast with a crossbar on a wheeled stand. One points up at Saturn, another holds out a white sheet.

5. The man in armour

   The biggest figure in the picture, in a breastplate and a plumed hat, hands on his hips. He's in profile, looking off to the left, away from Saturn. Behind him, half in shadow, a second figure stands with a dog.

Here and in his Jupiter the planet is small and the people watching it are smaller, pointing, holding out papers, aiming a telescope. What he paints is people finding it, which was the whole case Marsili wanted to put to a pope.

The Romantic Moon: Friedrich

By the 1800s the moon had become something to stand under and look at. Caspar David Friedrich painted two figures seen from behind on a path under a bare tree, watching it, more than once. In the version in Berlin, from around 1824, they are a man and a woman.

Look at the moon. It's a thin crescent, and the rest of the disc is there too, glowing faintly. Galileo explained that glow in 1610: the dark part of a young moon is lit by sunlight bouncing off the Earth, and “the benefit of her light to the Earth is balanced and repaid by the benefit of the light of the Earth to her.” The couple are looking at a moon that's partly lit by the Earth they're standing on.

Paintings of space now: Webb's Cosmic Cliffs

The Milky Way Elsheimer painted is still up there. Serge Brunier's panorama for ESO in 2009 shows the whole sky from both hemispheres, the band running straight across the middle with its dark lanes of dust and the bright bulge at the centre of our galaxy.

On 12 July 2022 NASA and ESA released the first full-colour pictures from the James Webb Space Telescope, and one of them looks like a landscape painting. The Cosmic Cliffs are the edge of NGC 3324, a young star-forming region in the Carina Nebula about 7,600 light-years away. The “mountains” are the wall of a huge cavity carved into the gas by ultraviolet light and winds from hot young stars, and the “steam” rising off them is hot, ionised gas and dust streaming away. Another of Webb's first images, the First Deep Field, shows distant galaxies bent into arcs by gravity, the same physics used to draw Gargantua, the black hole in Interstellar.

Every colour in it was chosen. Webb's Near-Infrared Camera made this picture through six filters, from 0.9 to 4.7 micrometres, all of it light past the red end of what an eye can see, and each filter's image was given a visible colour, blue for the shortest wavelength through cyan, green and orange to red and yellow for the longest. Elsheimer's night is almost all dark, its five lights a few specks on the copper. In Webb's cliffs the light is everywhere.

Why paintings of space feel like wonder

Every picture here is somebody looking up at something out of reach and bringing a piece of it back, with a brush on copper, a lens and brown watercolour, or six infrared filters. The wonder comes from both halves at once: the thing is real, and it is still too far away to touch. Creti paints people pointing at Saturn, Friedrich paints two people watching a moon partly lit by their own Earth, and Webb's cliffs are a place no one will ever stand. That is why a copper from 1609 and a telescope image from 2022 can hang side by side and make sense.

At Dawn Before Dusk puts that sky in a single frame. The sun breaks over the rim of a blue planet under a field of coloured stars, flaring into a spiked starburst like the ones on every bright star in a Webb image, and far below a lone figure on burning red ground faces up into it.

Frequently asked questions

What is the first painting of the Milky Way?

The Milky Way had been painted as a myth before, as milk spilled from Juno's breast in Tintoretto's Origin of the Milky Way around 1575. For the first painting to show it as a band of single stars in a real night sky, art historians point to Adam Elsheimer's The Flight into Egypt, 1609, oil on copper, in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich.

Did Elsheimer see the sky through a telescope?

It's still argued. A plaque in the church in Rome where he is buried says he did, and the Alte Pinakothek ties his sky to observations by Galileo and Federico Cesi with the new telescope. Keith Andrews, Michael Mendillo and Stefan Zieme argue the sky is an evocation built from what was already known: a Milky Way of stars had been printed in Leiden in 1600, and telescopes of the first Dutch design magnified only about three times.

Did Galileo draw the Moon?

Yes. In November and December 1609 he painted six watercolours of the Moon at different phases from what he saw through his telescope. They are in the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale in Florence. Engravings based on his drawings were printed in Sidereus Nuncius in 1610.

Are the colours in Webb's pictures real?

Webb sees mostly in infrared, which eyes can't see, so every colour in its pictures is assigned. Each filter's image is given a visible colour, usually the shortest wavelengths blue and the longest red. The shapes and brightnesses are measured, the colours are a translation.

Read next

• The Star Gate in 2001, how light became a corridor.
• Is Gargantua Real? Interstellar's black hole next to the real ones, and Webb's First Deep Field bent by gravity.
• Why Dune: Part Two goes black and white, infrared on Giedi Prime and on the Pillars of Creation.
• Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, one small figure, an infinite landscape, and Friedrich's two men under the moon.

References

• Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Alte Pinakothek, Adam Elsheimer, The Flight into Egypt, 1609, inv. 216: sammlung.pinakothek.de
• Deborah Howard, “Elsheimer's Flight into Egypt and the Night Sky in the Renaissance,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 55, no. 2 (1992): 212–224
• Anna Ottani Cavina, “On the Theme of Landscape II: Elsheimer and Galileo,” The Burlington Magazine 118, no. 876 (March 1976): 139–145
• Keith Andrews, Adam Elsheimer: Paintings, Drawings, Prints (1977); “The Elsheimer Inventory and Other Documents,” The Burlington Magazine 114 (September 1972): 594–607
• Michael Mendillo, “Landscape by Moonlight: Peter Paul Rubens and Astronomy,” Inspiration of Astronomical Phenomena VIII, ASP Conference Series 501 (2015): 21–30: adsabs.harvard.edu
• Stefan Zieme, “Imagining the Heavens: Adam Elsheimer's Flight into Egypt and the Renaissance Night Sky,” Journal for the History of Knowledge 2, no. 1 (2021), doi:10.5334/jhk.3: journalhistoryknowledge.org; and “The Renaissance Night Sky,” JHoK blog, 17 November 2021: blog.journalhistoryknowledge.org
• Julian Bell, “A Mind in Space,” The New York Review of Books, 11 May 2023: nybooks.com
• Galileo Galilei, Sidereus Nuncius (Venice, 1610), first edition, Smithsonian Libraries: archive.org; English quotations from The Sidereal Messenger, trans. Edward Stafford Carlos (London, 1880): archive.org
• Museo Galileo, “Galileo Galilei, Drawings of the Moon,” Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Ms. Gal. 48, f. 28r: brunelleschi.imss.fi.it; and Galileo's telescope, inv. 2428: brunelleschi.imss.fi.it
• William B. Ashworth Jr., “Lodovico Cigoli,” Scientist of the Day, Linda Hall Library, 12 September 2016: lindahall.org
• Federico Giannini and Ilaria Baratta, “Cigoli and his Immaculate Conception with Galileo's moon in the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore,” Finestre sull'Arte, 8 December 2014: finestresullarte.info
• The National Gallery, London, Jacopo Tintoretto, The Origin of the Milky Way, about 1575, NG1313: nationalgallery.org.uk
• Museo del Prado, Madrid, Peter Paul Rubens, The Birth of the Milky Way, 1636 to 1638, oil on canvas, 181 × 244 cm, P001668, from the Torre de la Parada series
• “The Flight into Egypt (Elsheimer),” Wikipedia, for Rubens's letter to Johann Faber of 14 January 1611: en.wikipedia.org
• Vatican Museums, “Donato Creti, Astronomical observations”: museivaticani.va; William B. Ashworth Jr., “Eustachio Manfredi,” Linda Hall Library, 20 September 2019: lindahall.org
• University of Oklahoma Libraries, Galileo's World, “The System of Saturn” (Huygens, Systema Saturnium, 1659): galileo.ou.edu
• ESO, “The Milky Way panorama,” eso0932a, 14 September 2009: eso.org
• ESA/Webb, “NIRCam Image of the ‘Cosmic Cliffs’ in Carina,” weic2205a, and release weic2205, 12 July 2022: esawebb.org
• Images: Elsheimer, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, CC BY-SA 4.0; Galileo's drawings, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence, via Wikimedia Commons; Tintoretto, The National Gallery via Google Arts & Culture; Rubens, Museo del Prado; Creti, Vatican Museums; Friedrich, Alte Nationalgalerie via Google Arts & Culture: all public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. ESA/Hubble, ESA/Webb and ESO images CC BY 4.0, credits with each picture.