All Portraits of Scientists

Portraits of Scientists gathers painted likenesses of the figures most closely associated with the Scientific Revolution, the period of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in which a new mathematical and observational approach to nature reshaped European thought and repeatedly put natural philosophers in tension with religious authority. Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler and Isaac Newton are named together as the central figures of this movement, each building on medieval university learning while overturning inherited cosmological doctrine. This group anchors four painted portraits of these men held in this atlas, works commissioned or later produced to commemorate individuals whose discoveries about the heavens and physical law repeatedly intersected with church doctrine, censure and reconciliation, a recurring theme in the history of religion's relationship with science.