Romanticismo and allegory in cosmology: aesthetics and ideology in the heliocentric system of Nicholas Copernicus

Abstract

The work De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (1543) installed the foundation stone of a mentality that conceived a new rationality model. The heliocentric hypothesis devised by Nicolas Copernicus has entered the contemporary narrative as one of the battles fought against medieval cosmology, which translates into a confrontation with the socio-political hegemony that the Catholic Church projected on the most decisive questions of humanity. Nevertheless, cosmology, seen through a hermeneutic gaze proposed by Ernst Cassirer, allows us to suspend the ascending condition of history in order to direct our attention to the neoplatonic, Pythagorean and Gnostic filiation of certain qualities that finally played in favour of the acceptance of the new image of the world. These doctrines were key in the articulation of that new cosmology, and nevertheless, our modernity has not known how to recognize its contributions to what could be a history of ideas. For these reasons we will relate the work with some cosmological precepts in the epistemological context of the Renaissance, which will shed light on certain unknown areas of the work, and also, why not, on certain unknown areas of the spirit of our modernity.