Abstract: In 1543, two books appeared that changed our view of the universe and of ourselves as humans: Nicolaus Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium and Andreas Vesalius’s De Humani Corporis Fabrica. Their publication seems to further an age-old conversation between interior and exterior worlds. Vesalius’s work includes a cross-sectional diagram of a human eye, made in the manner of a “cosmic figuration.” Is this a commentary on geocentricism, which represents the planets and stars from an earthly vantage point? For centuries, since the time of Galen, anatomy had imagined the eyeball as a series of concentric layers, culminating in an often centrally located lens that represents visual perception itself – a centralised vantage, gazing outward. Other writers of the time employ the eye as a symbol for divine perspective, highlighting the difference between finite and all-seeing vision. Nicholas of Cusa, in his treatise De Visione Dei (1453), uses the shifting eyes of a Veronica icon to invoke the creator’s omnivoyant gaze. God was a sphere with centre everywhere and circumference nowhere. Meanwhile, cartographers and painters were grappling with the incompleteness of human vision – singular, local and prone to deception. Copernicus himself notes that “For us who are borne by the earth, the sun and the moon pass by, And the stars return on their rounds, and again they drop out of sight.” Such tensions between subjective and objective viewpoints wind their way through the centuries, straight into modern times. Philosopher Hannah Arendt sums it up nicely: “The great strides of Galileo proved that both the worst fear of human speculation—that our senses might betray us—and its most presumptuous hope—the Archimedean wish for a point outside from which to unlock universal knowledge—could only come true together.” Celestial diagrams and descriptions throughout the ages bear the scars of this anxiety.

Expected October 2025