Regiomontanus: The Man in the Moon

Regiomontanus crop

By Tony Simcock, Museum archivist

Here is one of the Museum’s oldest books. Indeed, it is one of the first and most influential scientific books ever printed. It is the 1482 astronomical calendar compiled by Johannes de Monte Regio – his name can be seen at the end of the first and beginning of the second lines of the title-page (if it can be called that – title-pages hadn’t really been invented yet). Posterity knows P1000482the author as Regiomontanus, and honours him as one of the founders of the scientific renaissance – the dramatic revival of scientific learning and curiosity at the end of the Middle Ages.

We tend to think of the ‘Man in the Moon’ as a face occupying the Moon’s disc, though in earlier folklore he was imagined as a full-length figure, perhaps a little hunched and chilly, accompanied by a dog and a bush, or bunch of twigs. He is ‘yonder peasant’ whom King Wenceslas noticed gathering firewood in the snow. Shakespeare describes him similarly in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (about 1595):

This man, with lanthorn, dog, and bush of thorn, Presenteth Moonshine.

That’s what people gazing at the full Moon at that period made of the various dark shapes.

One un-typical early face in the Moon, however, represents something more than either folklore or optical illusion. Modelled into a crescent moon at the centre of a lunar volvelle in our 1482 book is a realistic profile face with distinctively rugged nose. It seems to be an authentic contemporary portrait of Regiomontanus himself, who had recently died at the early age of 40.

This posthumous edition of his astronomical calendar was printed in Venice by Erhard Ratdolt, a great admirer of Regiomontanus and himself a pioneer of scientific printing and illustration.

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The Man in the Moon: Regiomontanus himself

The first edition of the work had been issued at Nuremberg where, in about 1470, Regiomontanus set up a printing and publishing business, as well as an instrument making workshop. He was the first publisher of astronomical books. His vision was not one of cloistered scholarship for a learned élite – he set out to use the recently-invented printing press to disseminate mathematical and astronomical knowledge, and to make instruments for calculation and time-telling more widely available. Four real instruments, but printed on thick paper rather than expensively engraved in metal, are included at the end of his book.

P1000489It was thus much more than just a calendar; it was a compendium of astronomical and mathematical information with an overtly practical and educational purpose. It includes charts for daylight hours, phases of the Moon, and dates of Easter, with an explanatory essay, and an innovative calendar of predicted solar and lunar eclipses down to 1530. The pages providing an at-a-glance eclipse calendar by means of diagrammatic pictures of total and partial eclipses seem an obvious idea now, but it was the first time this simple visual technique had been used.

Study of the Moon may have had a long way still to go, but the Regiomontanus calendars were a giant leap in the direction of modern scientific knowledge. How appropriate that Ratdolt should add this touching tribute to his mentor in the 1482 reprint, and in so doing bequeath us a uniquely down-to-earth take on the Man in the Moon.

Penicillin productions

Penicillin jars

Penicillin may well have saved your life. This ‘yellow magic’, as it was first known, is an antibiotic wonder-drug of a type we now take for granted. But when penicillin was first being developed and refined, here in Oxford around the time of the Second World War, its healing properties were little short of miraculous.

As the Longitude Prize now seeks ideas to combat global antibiotic resistance, the importance of life-saving antibiotics like penicillin is back on the agenda.

The Museum’s collection holds some very important artefacts from the pioneering Oxford research into penicillin and we are currently working with computer science student Carl Schwedes to digitally reveal the processes used in that early research.

Here, we show some of Carl’s animation work in progress and he explains a little about his digital production techniques.

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By Carl Schwedes

I study computer science with media at the HTW-Dresden, the University of Applied Science in Dresden, and I am currently working with the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford. The creation of animations and 3D worlds is one of my favourite activities, so it is great to be able to work for the Museum to create new digital content relating to their collections.

Oxford, and especially the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology, is the origin of the development of the penicillin drug, a substance referred to as the ‘Miracle Drug’. The work of Howard Florey, Ernst Chain, and Norman Heatley in Oxford was instrumental in turning Alexander Fleming’s ‘accidental’ discovery of penicillin in 1928 into a reliably harvestable and safe drug for the treatment of patients. Their work, during the constrained period of war, saw some amazing successes with the small yields they were initially able to produce at the start of the 1940s.

Only a year or two later, it was possible to produce the penicillin substance at an industrial scale in the USA: the threat of war in Europe meant the USA was a safer place to build new industries for this production.

I work with MAXONs Cinema 4D, Adobe software, and After Effects to create the animations that show the penicillin production process that was happening in Oxford in the early 1940s. The visualization of the first production step of the whole penicillin animation was a good challenge for me.

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Creating the flask animations

I have used Cinema4 D’s Pyro-Cluster module for the foggy shape inside of the liquid at the start of the video. It was a good method to show how something starts to grow inside of this liquid-medium, building to a more complex shape with several mould layers by the end of the animation. It was quite tricky to combine these several materials and planes in combination with Vertex Maps to one big morphing system.

For the post production, I render the crude scene with illumination and textures in several layers in Cinema 4D, then combine this with After Effects. This multi-layer or ‘multi-pass’ rendering helps to correct and adjust the final look of the video.

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The animation above illustrates the first of six different steps in the extraction of the precious penicillin substance from the mouldy broth, which finally ends up as a crystal structure in a solid form. The video is being produced especially for the Museum for use as an educational tool and in a planned special exhibition on antibiotics.

Further stages in the animation will be revealed here as they are completed.

Carl Schwedes

The Art Club

 

Arts Award drawing

A few weeks ago a large group of schoolchildren began asking some probing questions: ‘What do you do in the Museum?’, ‘Did you always want to work in a museum?’, ‘Do you need to be a scientist to work here?’ and, perhaps most urgent of all, ‘How far can you see through this telescope?’.

The pupils were from St Mary & St John CE Primary School in Oxford and they weren’t merely excessively nosey, but were in fact conducting important research for a joint project run between the Museum and the school’s Art Club. The project was for Arts Award, an initiative supported by Arts Council England to promote young people’s engagement with the arts.

Work in progress...

Work in progress…

The children’s questions were part of interviews with different members of staff, designed to give them a better idea of what working in a museum is all about.

But that was just the start. As well as talking to staff, the pupils also explored the collections, making notes and taking photos during a tour of some of our highlight objects. These images, sketches and notes were later used as inspiration for their own artworks, created at the after-school Art Club during the autumn term.

Part of this process involved online research about their chosen object, as well as an investigation into how other artists have responded to similar subjects in the past.

A prosthetic hand and the Museum object which inspired it

A prosthetic hand and the Museum object which inspired it

Next, children began to construct 2D or 3D pieces using a variety of media, including chicken wire, modelling clay, wood, metal wire, and papier-mâché. There was a wide range of responses to the Museum’s objects, with some very impressive artistic techniques being displayed.

Finished pieces include a wooden model of a dissection theatre, inspired by stories of the anatomical demonstrations which once took place in the Museum’s lower floor; a prosthetic hand inspired by armour and the brass prosthetic hand on display here; and a fully functioning camera obscura!

In December, the artworks were all presented, along with labels written by the children, to school staff, family members, and the Museum’s director. We were amazed by the student’s responses and the standard of work proved just how inspired they were by the Museum’s collections, whose objects can sometimes be puzzling and complex. Yet the students explained their ideas coherently and enthusiastically, in language often beyond their years: literacy was an unexpected but welcome outcome of the project.

As a project it has been quite challenging, very in depth – in particular the research […] My son said it’s one of the best projects he has done this school year. […] I also like the vocabulary the children have used to talk about their work, the literacy and language development aspect is so important. It was so good to see the focus of each child on their work each week when I came to collect them – a nice intensity. – Parent

Every child in the project received a Discover-level Arts Award. You can read more about the project on our main website, and if you’d like to see the artworks themselves they will be on display throughout the Museum from 13 January – 1 March 2015.