A brief history of stargazing in the 18 th century
by Martin Reinhart
In his treatise Architecture, Essay on Art French architect and theorist Étienne-Louis Boullée claims to be the first one to propose a man-built simulation of nightly heavens. In much more detail than the features of the actual monument he describes the overwhelming impression of his utopian Cenotaph for Isaac Newton on the beholder :
“The onlooker finds himself as if by magic floating in the air, borne in the wake of images in the immensity of space. […] The lighting of this monument, which should resemble that on a clear night, is provided by the planets and stars that decorate the vault of the sky […] The daylight outside filters through these apertures into the gloom of the interior and outlines all the objects in the vault with bright, sparkling light. […] This form of lighting the monument is a perfect reproduction and the effect of the stars could not be more brilliant”. [1]
It is of course tempting to take Boullée’s stirring project dating from 1784 as a starting point for a genealogy of immersive media and to draw a direct line to our digital and virtualized present. [2] But as with almost every genealogy spanning such a long period of time, it would very likely only create the illusion of a coherent succession that hardly passes the test of a closer reading. So rather than seeking similarities and connections to our present world, it might be more rewarding to look at the stars through Boullée’s eyes. And maybe through this shift in perception one paradox of Johann Lurf’s film ★ can be tackled : the fact that the eternal spectacle of a starry sky also always works as a colossal projection screen – not only for man’s hopes and dreams, but also for humanity’s ever changing concepts of the universe.
Boullée’s Cenotaph has been contextualized and commented by numerous authors and the lavish ink drawings are today taken pars pro toto as an illustration of visionary architecture. Although much has been recently written about this never realised monument, it is difficult to tell how well it was known outside France during Boullée’s lifetime. However, it is a fact that Boullée was a highly regarded architect and an influential theorist. He built town houses and provincial Châteaus for the elite and designed representative buildings for the Ancien régime’s government. He served as a member of the Royal Academy of Architecture and later, when the royal academies were replaced, as an original member of the post-revolutionary Institut de France as well. Despite these achievements his work was almost completely forgotten until the mid 20th century. After the Second World War his colossal projects gained some interest by Modernist architects and in the 1970s his work became influential in the context of postmodernist architectural theory. [3] It was not, however, until Peter Greenaway’s 1987 film The Belly of an Architect that a greater public recognized his iconic renderings such as the Cenotaph.[4]
(Fig. 1) Étienne-Louis Boullée, four renderings of the Cenotaph for Isaac Newton, 1784, all black ink, grey wash, Bibliothèque nationale de France. This page: exterior and interior night-time view of the Cenotaph. Previous page: exterior and interior daylight view of the Cenotaph.
Apart from the six illustrations and a short description of the building in a section of Boullée’s essay titled To Newton no other contemporary source seems to refer to it directly. But even from this single first-hand comment it becomes evident that this architectural vision is an astoundingly rich agglomeration of ideas orbiting around the nature of truth. The ambitious idea behind it was to create something equally abstract as Newton’s brilliant mind that eventually led to the Age of Enlightenment. Boullée’s simple but yet ingenious idea was to put a boundless void in the very centre of his monument, which he describes as follows : “I turned over in my imagination all the magnificence of nature. I groaned at not being able to reproduce it. I wanted to give Newton that immortal resting place, the Heavens".
Even today it is difficult to grasp what exactly makes the Cenotaph such a fascinating project and even experts like Susanne von Falkenstein [5] struggle to give a comprehensive explanation concerning its unique design and programme. As we hopefully show in this short article, a number of contemporary connections have not yet been considered and we belief that these may be helpful in illuminating the matter further – specifically the way Newton’s world changing theory was interpreted in the 18th century and the fact that at the time, astronomy became the first field of science to be discussed by a wider public outside closed philosophical and scientific circles.
Of Shadows and Light
In his essay Boullée makes a clear differentiation between art and nature saying :
“The effect of this magnificent composition is, as we can see, produced by nature. One could not arrive at the same result with the usual techniques of art. It would be impossible to depict in a painting the azure of a clear night sky with no cloud, its colour scarcely distinguishable for it lacks any nuance, any graduation, the brilliant light of the stars standing out garishly, brilliantly from its darkened tone. In order to obtain the natural tone and effect, which are possible in this monument, it was necessary to have recourse to all the magic of art and to paint with nature, i.e. to put nature to work; and I can say that this discovery belongs to me”.
On one level Boullée, who in fact was a trained academic painter, very clearly refers here to his invention of the funnel-like holes that would produce the effect of sparkling stars of different sizes inside the sphere. The claim to utilise sunlight rather than depicting the stars in the form of a fresco or mosaic may explain the phrase to ‘paint with nature’ sufficiently at first sight. But Boullée’s claim should now also be understood in a deeper, more philosophical way, since it addresses the iconoclastic quality of the Cenotaph and the then novel perception of reality and space indicated in the Newtonian concept of the universe.
A very interesting aspect in this context is the fact that many features of the Cenotaph can also be found in Robert Barker’s Panorama – an almost contemporaneous invention that was patented in 1793 and first erected as a permanent rotunda on Leicester Square in 1801. The Cenotaph and the Panorama were both intended to simulate a reality and in both cases daylight was used to produce the desired illusion. In the case of the Panorama’s rotunda, the circular roof is built in such an ingenious way that only the curved canvas is illuminated by daylight while the rest of the cylindrical room remains in complete darkness. This setup in combination with the naturalistic and seamless painting on display creates an overwhelming effect and the perfect illusion of a distant view. The Cenotaph’s spherical dome is, in its construction, perforated in such a way that sunlight enters through a myriad of conical holes to create the illusion of a starlit firmament. In order to obtain the maximum effect the beholder in both cases is forced into a very specific position, which Boullée explains as follows :
“The form of the interior of this monument is, as you can see, that of a vast sphere. […] The unique advantage of this form is that, from whichever side we look at it (as in nature) we see only a continuous surface which has neither beginning nor end and the more we look at it, the larger it appears. This form has never been utilised and it is the only one appropriate to this monument, for its curve ensures that the onlooker cannot approach what he is looking at; he is forced, as if by one hundred different circumstances outside his control, to remain in the place assigned to him and which, since it occupies the centre, keeps him at a sufficient distance to contribute to the illusion. He delights in it, without being able to destroy the effect by wanting to come too close in order to satisfy his empty curiosity. He stands alone and his eyes can behold nothing but the immensity of the sky”.
Although it is a cylindrical rather than spherical theatre, the same is basically true for the Panorama, which also features an elevated central platform that is accessed from below. The idea to lead the visitor through a dark corridor before he is exposed to the actual attraction is both a theatrical effect and a physiological necessity to accustom the onlooker’s eyes to the interior’s dim light.
(Fig. 2) Robert Mitchell, cross section of Barker’s Panorama building in Leicester Square, 1801, coloured aquatint, British Library
Whereas the Cenotaph remained the un-built vision of an eccentric, copies of Barker’s Panorama were commissioned all over Europe to become one of the first ‘mass media’ visited by millions. Nevertheless, Boullée’s work connects in a much more profound way to the philosophical ideas of his time – both in its all-over conception and in its many well-reasoned details. While Barker’s invention is based on the sophisticated presentation of a painting, Boullée rejects ‘the magic of art’ and demands ‘to put nature to work’. In Boullée’s eyes this is not a contradiction, since for him architectural form follows universal rules, whilst a painting remains an illusionary trick that depends on ever-changing fashions and trends.
Peter Eisenman [6] has characterized the Enlightenment’s specific view on the supposed timeless quality of classical architecture as a ‘“Fiction” of History’. He argues that composition in Renaissance architecture ‘was not an open-ended or neutral process of transformation, but rather a strategy for arriving at a predetermined goal; it was the mechanism by which the idea of order, represented in the orders, was translated into a specific form. Reacting against the cosmological goals of Renaissance composition, Enlightenment architecture aspired to a rational process of design whose ends were products of pure, secular reason rather than of divine order.’
Still, one may add, that during Boullée’s lifetime this process was in a state of flux and cosmological or idealistic thinking was not necessarily understood as an opposition to a building’s specific purpose or function. Yet this statement may become less abstract once the Cenotaph’s classic antetype is revealed – the Pantheon in Rome, which still today is considered a marvel of the ancient world.
It has been stated that every single one of Boullée’s visionary projects is based on one of Rome’s classic buildings, but it is still not known if the French architect ever visited the Eternal City himself. [7] Boullée also never explicitly referred to the Pantheon, but there is no doubt that the design of the Cenotaph owes a lot to it. Most prominently, the Pantheon features a vast dome, which is designed as a demi-sphere on a cylindrical base. The height of the building is chosen in such a way that the complete sphere would fit into it – or in other words — that the 43.3 metre diameter of the dome exactly equals the height of the structure. Furthermore, the Pantheon’s dome has a circular opening 8.3 metre wide on the top of the cupola, which is often referred to as the oculus or eye. As with the Cenotaph’s sun-lit stars, the opening at the apex is the only natural sources of light and in both cases, the dome symbolizes the arched vault of the heavens. In the case of the Pantheon this effect was originally emphasized by five rings of 28 sunken coffers, which were covered with gold-plated bronze rosettes symbolising the starry firmament. The metal sheets were removed by Constans II in 663 and have never been replaced.
Just recently well-substantiated assumptions have been made that the Pantheon was originally designed as an astronomical instrument serving a Roman solar cult and featuring a sundial.[8] In this reading the five rings of the dome would symbolize the five planets then known to the Romans and their 28 segments representing the days of a full moon circle. It is further assumed that the building was part of the Roman mystery cult of Mithras in which the summer solstice was regarded as the point of entry for souls from heaven into this world, while at the winter solstice lay the point of reentry to heaven. According to the Neoplatonic philosopher Porphyry the cult’s meetings took place in a cave-like setting, whose form was regarded as a symbol of the cosmos.
As convincing as these arguments are and therefore as tempting as it might be to construct an even closer affinity between the Pantheon and the Cenotaph, it is very unlikely that any of these insights were known to Boullée. What however must have been apparent to him and his generation of neoclassical architects were the formal and symbolic aspects of the temple. Especially the unique application of natural light must have been inspiring given the fact that one central doctrine of the Enlightenment was the evidence of the visible as the primary source of knowledge. In this context, light was understood as the source of truth on a metaphorical, but also on a practical level : light had to be brought to all the obscure places in order to defeat humanities ignorance – just as Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo overcame the geocentric model of our solar system through their observations and calculations. In the understanding of the 18th century the work of these scientists was the foundation of an Age of Reason that would liberate mankind from superstition and allow them to emancipate from God. The sun in this context no longer represents divinity, but serves as the visible proof of reason’s victory.
(Fig. 3) Giovanni Paolo Panini, Interior of the Pantheon, Rome, c. 1734, oil on canvas, Washington National Gallery of Art
The importance of light as the source of knowledge and understanding leads us to yet another classical philosophical discussion about the relation between perception and truth that might be related to the Cenotaph in several ways. Plato’s Allegory of the Cave certainly was commonly known and discussed in the 18 th century [9] and it can be therefore assumed that Boullée was well aware of it. In the allegory, the cave represents superficial physical reality. It also represents ignorance, as those in the cave accept what they see at face value. Ignorance is further represented by the darkness that engulfs them because they cannot know the true objects that form the shadows, leading them to believe the shadows are the true forms of the objects. The chains that prevent the prisoners from leaving the cave represent them being trapped in ignorance, as the chains are stopping them from learning the truth. The shadows cast on the walls of the cave represent the superficial truth, which is the illusion that the prisoners in the cave see. In turn, the freed prisoner represents those who understand that the physical world is only a shadow of the truth, and that the sun glaring in the eyes of the prisoners represents the higher truth of ideas. The light further represents wisdom, as even the paltry light that makes it into the cave allows the prisoners to identify shapes. [10]
Understood in this way, many of the aspects laid out in the allegory can be found in the concept of the Cenotaph – with one big difference : Boullée’s interpretation is about overcoming the prison of the cave thanks to Newton’s ‘sublime mind’ and his ‘profound genius’. In his praise of the deceased scientist, Boullée very clearly underlines the tremendous impact of Newton’s work for humanity and also articulates the difficulties in finding an appropriate architectural solution for the Cenotaph :
“With the range of your intelligence and the sublime nature of your Genius, you have defined the shape of the earth; I have conceived the idea of enveloping you with your discovery. That is as it were to envelop you in your own self. How can I find outside you anything worthy of you ? It was these ideas that made me want to make the sepulchre in the shape of the earth. […] I turned over in my imagination all the magnificence of nature. I groaned at not being able to reproduce it. I wanted to give Newton that immortal resting place, the Heavens”.
As clear as this statement might sound it is interesting that Boullée refuses to directly translate his idea into an architectural form as, for example, his contemporary Jean-Jacques Lequeu did in his Projet de temple de la Terre, dating from 1794. In Lequeu’s project – that was clearly inspired by the Cenotaph – the equalization of the planet’s shape with the celestial dome is taken much more literally and accordingly to the idea of the architecture parlante [11] : the outside of the structure is modelled as a terrestrial globe while the interior serves as the starlit vault of the sky. This project shows similar differences to the Cenotaph as it does to the Panorama. Lequeu’s Temple of Earth in this sense is much more closely related to later built attractions like the Georama Delanglard (Paris, 1826) or Wyld’s Great Globe (London, 1851) – both attempted to popularize geoscience in the early 19th century. What all the buildings mentioned above and the Panorama do have in common is their educational approach and as a result their lack of mystery or – as Boullée puts it – their ‘empty curiosity’.
(Fig. 4) Jean Jacques Lequeu, Geometrical Elevation of the Temple of the Earth, 1794, feather, watercolour, Bibliothèque nationale de France
Per aspera ad astra
In order to get back to the comparison with Plato’s Allegory of the Cave it is first necessary to focus on a theatrical feature of the Cenotaph mentioned earlier : the entranceway to the celestial sphere.
While Boullée only mentions it briefly in his text, he has obviously put some thought and effort into the renderings. But it is not possible, neither from either the drawings nor from the text, to determine how many entrances the building actually has. In the horizontal projection there are three tunnels indicated by dotted lines of which two are also plotted in the cross section – yet the ways they are designed differ in the illustrations. In the daylight views two symmetrical corridors lead from the outside to the central tomb. Each of the two long and narrow aisles starts at a below-ground level entrance and lead straight into the dark base of the gigantic building. Only at the very end of the path do they turn into inclining staircases that meet beneath the tomb and lead to the narrow doorway, which is the sole entrance to the monument. This design is consistent with the horizontal projection, which also shows that the tomb’s cubic base can be accessed by three identical staircases forming a frustum.
The night-time view of the Cenotaph featuring a central light source shows a different kind of entrance. On the ground level it starts with the same kind of concave doorway that funnels into a low but short passage. After a few meters it widens into a corridor that is at least twice as high and which in the last quarter of its length turns into a set of three shallow staircases that climb closer and closer to the corridor’s ceiling. At the narrowest point it abruptly ends and gives way to the spherical interior of the Cenotaph. Interesting enough, there are also two additional entrances leading from the first elevated level on the monument’s outside straight to the sphere’s inside space. The entrance to this gangway can clearly be seen on the two drawings showing the building’s exterior where a small doorway is positioned above the main entrance. From the outside it functions as the centre of an altar-like structure that carries a ceremonial fireplace on top.
There is no way that the two designs could be different views of the same building, even from different angles – they are very clearly two alternative versions of the Cenotaph’s interior. And here things are getting interesting in a conceptual way, too. The night and day versions of the monument have repeatedly been interpreted as inverse modes to illuminate the monument : while it is day outside, the stars are sparkling inside and as soon as night falls, the central sun of the gigantic orrery starts to shine. But the enormous central sun is neither depicted in the day version of the Cenotaph nor is it mentioned in Boullée’s description of the monument. There he only refers to his ‘discovery’ – the simulated nightly sky. But why did the architect obviously prefer one design to the other ?
In my understanding – due the lack of any historical sources, supporting any argument is purely hypothetical – the night-time view version seems to be an earlier attempt, while the one praised by its creator is the final and more satisfying solution Boullée found. As much as he emphasises the importance to reproduce the magnificence of nature with its own means, an artificial sun may not have lived up to the high standards the architect has defined for his masterpiece. The reason for this might again be found in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave where an artificial light source also plays a central role in creating an illusion of the world – whilst the real sun is the source of true understanding. We believe that in his praise of Newton, Boullée refused to use a theatrical trick and instead, like mentioned earlier, wanted to ‘envelop’ the genius in his ‘discovery’.
We have already shown that Boullée went to quite some effort to create an overwhelming sensation upon entering the sphere. In this concern the two proposed solutions might seem rather similar at first sight, but actually they differ in a few essential details. In the night-time version of the Cenotaph the visitor enters at the very point, where the sphere intersects with the base and arrives just in front of the empty sarcophagus. Once he has left the darkness of the gangway, all of the monument’s features are to be seen at once and in glaring brightness: the celestial bodies, the scientist’s empty grave and the inner surface of the boundless shell aligned. Like in Plato’s allegory here the sun is intended to represent the higher truth of ideas.
In contrast to this projection, the experience in the alternative solution is of a more complex nature and touches the ambivalent way in which Newton’s theory was received in the 18th century. In the daylight version of the Cenotaph the visitor has to walk through a narrow and dark passage. This in our understanding symbolises the transfer to another world that is entirely built upon truth and mathematical order.
That fact that the exit is located just below the empty tomb could be understood as a memento mori, but in fact we think that there is more to it. When compared to another neoclassical cenotaph of the time – the one for Marie Christina of Austria by Antonio Canova in Vienna (1805) – one can see an almost similar undecorated doorway like the passage to the hereafter. A group of mourners is entering the portal to take the path that no living soul has ever returned from. In the case of the Cenotaph the situation is reversed in such a way that the visitor steps out of the door – and by doing so he symbolically overcomes death and enters eternity which is represented by the symmetry of the sphere that – as Boullée points out – has the unique advantage of neither having a beginning nor an end.
This separation of worlds also can be found in Plato’s philosophy that distinguishes between the spheres of the visible and the intelligible. In Plato’s understanding the visible is related to the physical world while the intelligible is a property of the mind. The visible world is filled with objects and images relating to belief and imagination while the intelligible is full of forms and scientific objects that relate to understanding and thought. We believe that the inner sphere of the Cenotaph is meant as a representation of the intelligible world of pure knowledge, which – as Boullée writes – contains the tomb as the only material object, while the dematerialized ‘onlooker finds himself as if by magic floating in the air, borne in the wake of images in the immensity of space’.
Yet another implication in this context that is worth exploring, but unfortunately leads too far off the topic : it is not discussed if or how far Boullée was involved in Masonic circles, but the subject of the Cenotaph as well as the time in which it was designed and its formal and symbolic features are very strong indicators that the architect was at least familiar with the mind-set of the then very influential movement. For Boullée – as for the Freemasons – Newton’s work very clearly was taken as proof that man has the ability to grow and through the gift of reason has the capacity to emancipate himself from suppression. Most of the Grand Lodges were founded during the 18th century and Newton himself has been associated with various secret societies and fraternal orders throughout history. [12] So it does not seem unlikely that the Cenotaph also could be understood as a temple of reason – both in the short lived doctrine of the French Revolution and as part of the masonic rite. The empty grave in this context does therefore not refer to the missing body, but is home to the eternal genius. Hence, the pathway appears as a Masonic journey [13] to overcome superstition and ignorance in order to reach perfection.
Looking at the stars
How can Boullée’s remark, that he wants to ‘envelop’ Newton in his ‘discovery’, be understood and how does it relate to the way Newton’s work was received in pre-revolutionary Paris of the late 18th century ? In his excellent book The Newton Wars [14] author J.B. Shank laid out in detail how Newton’s ground-breaking, but highly theoretical book, Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica was commented upon and popularised almost immediately after its first printing in 1687 and how the perception of his scientific findings have changed over the decades and in different countries.
Shank also shows how one aspect of Newton’s scientific insights, the movement of the planets, especially gained public attention all over Europe. Newton in this concern could build upon the research of Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo, but his groundbreaking achievement was the proof that the newfound laws of gravity could also be applied on a cosmic scale – therefore the elliptic motion of the planets could be calculated exactly. In this regard, people living in the 18th century were in an unparalleled situation since for the first time in world history man’s genius created an elegant and self-consistent model that was capable of explaining all aspects of physics even beyond his reach. Especially in England and Germany this aspect of Newton’s work was interpreted as a proof for the ingenuity of god’s creation, while in France its scientific method and reductionism were seen as an argument to question religious orthodoxy and as a harbinger of the impending reign of reason.
But regardless of the different ideological and political implications it is safe to say that astronomy was the first scientific discipline ever to become widely popular. Throughout the 18th century, lectures and demonstrations on celestial mechanics were given all over Europe and along with the growing number of educational books on astronomy a number of new planetary machines appeared – the most popular of them being the orrery. In 1703 Christiaan Huygens published details of such a heliocentric planetary device, which was later manufactured in various scales and designs. Some of them were driven by a clockwork mechanism showing the movement of all the planets, some less sophisticated and only showing the moon rotating around earth. From the 1780 s on large-scale Orreries, like Adam Walker’s Eidouranion, were used for public lectures and built big enough to entertain crowds in theatres such as the King’s Theatre or the English Opera House.
However, the more interesting aspect of the orrery in our context is depicted in the famous 1766 painting of Joseph Wright of Derby titled A Philosopher giving that Lecture on the Orrery. The scene skillfully expresses the way in which entertainment and science are mutually constitutive of the observation. Most importantly, it captures a radical change in perspective – or as Kurt Vanhoutte beautifully said : ‘The spectators in the painting, stepped outside the existing model of the solar system and looked back at it from an imaginary outside perspective, rearranging the theatre of the planets and the sun in an entirely new way.’[15]
We believe it is exactly this change of perspective – the ability to create a model of our universe and to step out of it – is the key to understand Boullée’s Cenotaph for Isaac Newton. But before we can elaborate on this assumption, we must consider the time lag of almost a century between the first publication of the Philosophiæ Naturalis in 1687 and Boullée’s design for the Cenotaph dating from 1784. During these years, the perception of Newton’s work changed radically and by the 1750 s a new generation of scientists had derived their own theories about the mathematical treatment of cosmological systems. During Newton’s lifetime (1643 – 1727) mainstream astronomy focussed on the planetary system and discussed the shape of the earth and its interaction with the moon. Apart from these aspects there was not much interest in stellar astronomy and it remained the task of a small group of pioneers to develop first comprehensive cosmological theories. A key question in this regard : Why is the visible fixed-star sky not organized in a more orderly way given the fact that the same forces drive not only the entire universe but also this solar system ? One important step along the way was to find an explanation for the visible phenomenon of the Milky Way.
As Anna Holterhoff [16] showed in her brilliant article on this topic, one attempt in this direction was made by Thomas Wright of Durham – an English philosopher, astronomer, mathematician, instrument maker, architect, and garden designer – in his 1750 book An Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe. Wright correctly assumes that the sun is not the centre of the universe as in the Copernican worldview, but is in reality one fixed star among many. He further rejects the assumption of a homogeneous distribution of stars and identifies the Milky Way as a disk consisting of individual stars and the nebulae observed by astronomers as entirely other galaxies. One interesting consequence of his speculation, as Anna Holterhoff points out, was Wright’s belief that the entire universe was still organised like our solar system – with one main centre, which was inhabited by the ‘great Author of Nature’ himself. From God’s privileged position, the myriads of stars and planets would present themselves in a perfect order – our earthly view on the universe however appears distorted due the offset of our very perspective.
Although Wright’s idea was taken up and elaborated by Immanuel Kant in his 1755 Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens, it is again more than unlikely that Boullée might have been familiar with it. This little detail illustrates a shift away from simplified models of the universe as presented in the toy-like orrery to a much more visionary scale. Even if Newton was biased by his religious beliefs, he has forever changed the way we look at the stars. His discovery – or at least as Boullée has interpreted it – did not lay in the explanation of the celestial mechanics alone, but in providing a gateway to a sphere of reason capable to even solve problems not yet known to man. I believe that this is the actual reason why Boullée abandoned the idea of the artificial sun and the gigantic orrery in the centre of the Cenotaph and instead chose the endless skies as the suitable way to commemorate Newton’s achievements.
What becomes evident is that Boullée did not want to educate the onlooker in the same way the philosopher in Wright’s painting lectures his innocent audience by trivialising universal problems. In providing a model of the heavens, he rather emphasizes the enormous dimension of the challenges that an endless universe still holds for mankind. The observer is bound to his given position but through careful observation and analytical thought he can still leave the darkness of ignorance and find a higher truth. The shadows on the wall of Plato’s cave have been replaced by sparkling stars, each of them a sun of its own, each of them illuminated by the same eternal light. This light represents wisdom, as even the paltry light that makes it into the sphere gives enough clues to solve the great mysteries of existence. The Cenotaph’s message, so it seems, runs through the gift of reason, we can leave the cave – but only to find ourselves in another one.
(Fig. 5) George Wyld's Great Globe in Leicester square, printed in The Illustrated London News, 1851
(Fig. 6) Le Géorama de Charles François Paul Delanglard, printed in L’Illustration, 1826
(Fig. 7) Detail of the entrance to the sphere in the daylight view of the Cenotaph
(Fig. 8) Detail of the entrance to the sphere in the night-time view of the Cenotaph
(Fig. 9) Detail of the tomb in the daylight view of the Cenotaph
(Fig. 10) Jan Saenredam, Cave of Plato after Cornelis van Haarlem, 1604, engraving, British Library
(Fig. 11) Charles Swagers, The Tomb of Maria Christina of Austria, by Antonio Canova, 1820s, oil on canvas, Princeton University Art Museum
(Fig. 12) Adam Walker exhibiting the Eidouranion at English Opera House on March 21 st, 1817, print (detail), Victoria and Albert Museum, London
(Fig. 13) Joseph Wright of Derby, A Philosopher giving that Lecture on the Orrery in which a lamp is put in place of the Sun, oil on canvas, 1766, Derby Museum and Art Gallery
(Fig. 14) Two illustrations from Thomas Wright of Durham's book An Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe, 1770. Wright imagined the Milky Way as part of the sphere of mortality, which revolves around a divine center. According to him there are countless other systems like ours, always with a divine centre symbolised by God’s eye in his illustrations.
(Fig. 15) Detail of the central sun and orrery depicted in the night-time view of the Cenotaph
Footnotes
[1] All quotes are taken from the English translation : Boullée, Etienne-Louis : Architecture, Essay on Art. Ed. Helen Rosenau. London, 1952.
[2] A recent example of such an anthology : Firebrace, William : Star Theatre : The Story of the Planetarium. London, 2017.
[3] See : Etlin, Richard A. : Symbolic Space : French Enlightenment Architecture and Its Legacy. Chicago, 1994.
[4] It is a widespread myth that Boullée’s work was admired by Albert Speer and anticipated by fascist architects. This is simply not possible since only very few short articles about Boullée were published in the late 1930 s like the one by Emil Kaufmann in the September 1939 issue of Art Bulletin. All other publications date from well after the Second World War like Kaufmann’s book Three Revolutionary Architects : Boullée, Ledoux, and Lequeu which was first published in 1952 and received by a wider public only after the exhibition of the same name at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1968.
[5] This article owes a lot to : Falkenhausen, Susanne von : KugelbauVisionen. Kulturgeschichte einer Bauform von der Französischen Revolution bis zum Medienzeitalter. Bielefeld, 2008.
[6] Eisenmann, Peter : The End of the Classical : The End of the Beginning, the End of the End.
In : Perspecta 21. Yale, 1984.
[7] For example : Marder, Tod A. (Ed.) : The Pantheon : From Antiquity to the Present. Cambridge, 2015.
[8] Hannah, Robert : Time in Antiquity. Routledge, 2008.
[9] Most prominently, main concepts of Plato’s works were the building blocks for René Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy (1641) in which the nature of truth is also discussed. Descartes believes that like the prisoners in the cave who depended on their senses to define truth, he only sees shadows and reflections and not the truth. He concludes that man must examine and discard many of his beliefs if he is to find truth and knowledge – and start again finding truth. Descartes’ philosophy, establishing human reason as autonomous, not only provided the basis for the Enlightenment’s emancipation from God and the Church, but also was an important basis for Isaac Newton’s work.
[10] The description of the Allegory is based on the corresponding Wikipedia article, since it summarises it in the most condensed and accurate way.
[11] Dating from 1784, the Cenotaph often is considered to be the one iconic example of architecture parlante, a variety of the classicistic style that promotes the idea of making architecture expressive of its purpose. The phrase was originally associated with the work of Claude Nicolas Ledoux and only later extended to other Paris-trained architects of the Revolutionary period. The notion in this context might however be misleading today since it is not meant in a Modernist or Functionalist sense. Especially in the case of the Cenotaph ‘programmatic’ might be a more accurate description, since the functions of this building do have more of a metaphoric quality than are owed to practical value.
[12] See for example : Bauer, Alain : Isaac Newton’s Freemasonry : The Alchemy of Science and Mysticism. Rochester, 2007 and https ://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton%27s_occult_studies.
[13] All Freemasons begin their journey in the ‘craft’ by being progressively ‘initiated’, ‘passed’ and ‘raised’ into the three degrees of Craft, or Blue Lodge Masonry. During these three rituals, the candidate is progressively taught the Masonic symbols, and entrusted with grips or tokens, signs and words to signify to other Masons which degrees he has taken. The dramatic allegorical ceremonies include explanatory lectures, and revolve around the construction of the Temple of Solomon, and the artistry and death of the chief architect, Hiram Abiff. While many different versions of these rituals exist, with various lodge layouts and versions of the Hiramic legend, each version is recognisable to any Freemason from any jurisdiction. (cited from Wikipedia)
[14] Shank, J.B. : The Newton Wars and the Beginning of the French Enlightenment. Chicago, 2008.
[15] Vanhoutte, Kurt : Performing Astronomy : The Orrery as Model, Theatre and Experience. In : Media Archaeology and Intermedial Performance : Deep Time of the Theatre. Ed. Nele Wynants . London, 2019.
[16] Anna Holterhoff : Naturwissenschaft versus Religion ? Zum Verhältnis von Theologie und Kosmologie im 18. Jahrhundert. (TOPOI – towards a historical epistemology of space). Berlin, 2009.