Littérature scientifique sur le sujet « Gottorf Globe »

The history of modern collections of MAE (Kunstkamera) RAS roots to Peter the Great’s private gatherings. However, the ascertainment of correlation of modern museum objects with the ones which were in the museum in the first quarter of the 18th century demands complicated research – work with the objects, archival documents and historiographical background. Results of this kind of work with scientific instruments are presented in the current article. The research leads to the conclusion that seven objects presented at modern expositions can be surely determined as originating from Peter the Great’s collections: the Great Gottorf (Academic) globe, armillary sphere, lens, two sundials, goniometer and protractor. Twenty-five more instruments can be also associated with Peter the Great’s collections, but the discovery of additional documentary evidence is hardly possible. They are compasses, telescopes, backstaff and a row of drawing instruments (compasses, protractors, rulers, angles, levels and pens). Some museum objects (such as B. Scott’s boussole and N. G. Chizhov’s sundial) came to the memorial Emperor’s cabinet in the second half of the 18th – first half of the 19th century by mistake, they could not be made in the first quarter of the 18th century.

In 1784 the visionary French architect Etienne-Louis Boullée (1728– 1799) designed a colossal monument to Isaac Newton (1642–1727) that was both a cenotaph and a planetarium. A tribute to Newton’s contributions to astronomy, the building was conceived as a microcosm in which the night sky would be visible by day and the daytime sky by night. Entering the ‘center of gravity’ of a vast hollow globe set in cylindrical tiers, the viewer would experience the virtual reality of the starry heavens created by natural light sparkling through shafts in the exterior of the masonry sphere. At night, the interior would be transformed into day by a luminous artificial sun suspended from the vault in an armillary sphere. Belonging to the brotherhood of freemasons whose motto was ‘lux ex tenebri’ or ‘light out of darkness’, Boullée believed in the mystical origins of knowledge. His monument was a vindication of Newton whose law of universal gravitation had been attacked as ‘occult’ by Leibniz and others. Boullée’s design can be traced to Archimedes, who was the son of an astronomer and the inventor of the first planetarium c. 250 BCE. Archimedes’ tomb in Syracuse was surmounted with a sphere inside a cylinder representing his discovery of the formulas for finding their volumes and surface areas. The Newton cenotaph was also a development of the Gottorp Globe (1654-1664), a revolving planetarium made of a pierced hollow sphere that held twelve people. Although the enormity of Boullée’s plan was impossible to construct in the eighteenth century, architects treasured his evocative drawings. More than 200 years later, the architect James Stewart Polshek acknowledged the Newton cenotaph as the inspiration for his design for the planetarium of the Rose Center for Earth and Space in New York.