Rudolf II

The teaching

Taught from the record of his court at Prague: its cabinet of wonders, its painters, its alchemists and its astronomers.

The world gathered in a room

Rudolf's court teaches by gathering. Its cabinet of art and wonders is a picture of creation in small, and its inventory sorts the whole into three kinds. The naturalia are the works of nature: shells and corals, horns and minerals, bezoars and mandrake roots. The artificialia are the works of human hands: paintings, carved gems, bronzes, turned ivory, clocks and figures that move by clockwork. The scientifica are the instruments by which the heavens and the earth are measured. Walked through in order, the cupboards show the maker's work, the human work that imitates it, and the tools by which both are understood.

The pieces the court loved best stand on the border between the kinds: a nautilus shell mounted by a goldsmith as a cup, a branch of coral finished in silver, a slab of stone whose veins already look like hills and clouds, which the court's stone cutters completed as a landscape. In each, nature begins a work and art completes it. The lesson of the cabinet is that the two are one labour, and that art is nature carried further by human hands.

Virtues hidden in stones and roots

The court kept many natural things for their hidden virtues as well as for their strangeness. The bezoar, a stone that forms in the stomach of the wild goat of Persia and of other beasts, was held to draw out poison, and the court's goldsmith set bezoars in gold so that they could be kept at hand. The mandrake, a root that can grow in the shape of a little man, was held to carry powers of its own and was treasured in the cabinet; it is a poisonous plant, and it was kept, not taken. Gems were cut in the court's own workshops and prized for their colour and their fire, and for the virtues that the old books of stones gave to each.

The work of fire

Alchemy at Prague is a craft of the court, pursued in the open. The emperor kept laboratories, paid adepts who came to him from across Europe and gathered their books and manuscripts, and he asked of the art the two things it had always promised together: gold, the perfect metal, and the medicine, the elixir that perfects a sick body as the stone perfects a base metal. The court's rule was trial. A process was to be shown at the furnace before witnesses, and an adept who promised the stone was held to his word.

The heavens measured

The court's astronomy rests on measurement. The most exact record of the planets yet made, gathered by Tycho Brahe over a lifetime of nights, passed at Prague to the man who could read it. From Tycho's measures of Mars, Johannes Kepler found that a planet moves not in a circle but in an ellipse with the Sun at one focus, sweeping out equal areas in equal times, and he dedicated the book that says so, the New Astronomy of 1609, to the emperor.

The same men served the court's astrology, for the emperor wished to know what the heavens were bringing. Kepler, who cast its horoscopes, held that the angles the planets make with one another stir the soul as a harmony stirs a listener: they move a person's nature, and they do not decide a person's deeds.

Vertumnus: every season in one face

The court's painters teach the cabinet's lesson in play. Giuseppe Arcimboldo builds a face out of the things of the world: in his Vertumnus the emperor's features are pears and apples, cherries and grapes, ears of wheat, flowers, gourds and roots, each painted true to nature, and seen together they are a man. The riddle says that a person is made of the world and answers to it part for part.

Vertumnus is the Roman god of the turning year, who can take every shape, and in the picture the fruits of every season grow at once, which no garden can do. The poet Gregorio Comanini, who wrote verses for it, read it as praise of its sitter: under this ruler the seasons bear together, as they did in the golden age.