The Puzzle of Brueghel's Paintings of Telescopes

Technology Review ^ | 02 Oct 2009 | TR

[Lx]

The Dance
by William Carlos Williams

Try to say it without speeding up.

In Breughel’s great picture, The Kermess,
the dancers go round, they go round and
around, the squeal and the blare and the
tweedle of bagpipes, a bugle and fiddles
tipping their bellies (round as the thick-
sided glasses whose wash they impound)
their hips and their bellies off balance
to turn them. Kicking and rolling about
the Fair Grounds, swinging their butts, those
shanks must be sound to bear up under such
rollicking measures, prance as they dance
in Breughel’s great picture, The Kermess.

[DBrow]

Simple answer is that the image of the telescope was photoshopped in later, by Huygens or Kepler himself.

[RobRoy]

If you look just to the right of the hand in the picture you can clearly see an iPhone too.

It is no surprise really, With all the times I’ve gone back in time I’ve more than once left a few modern accouterments. It was a virtual certainty that one of them would end up in a painting. People were amazed by the stuff.

[my_pointy_head_is_sharp]

15 years before this design was thought to have been built

I do get tired of scientists always claiming to know more than they actually do. They seem to have such tightly closed little minds.

[Hegemony Cricket]

Stranger still - why is it pointed into the armpit of that winged toddler?

[a fool in paradise]

15 years before this design was thought to have been built

>>I do get tired of scientists always claiming to know more than they actually do. They seem to have such tightly closed little minds.

It's evidence of the existence of time machines.

[fish hawk]

And behind the legs of the Cherub on the right is the stainless steel barrel of a 50 cal. sniper rifle.

[RobRoy]

One of my all time favorite "science fiction" books:

[smokingfrog]

Maybe it’s a Jacob Metius telescope. He was supposed to have destroyed all his work, but maybe he really didn’t.

[Conan the Librarian]

Galileo wasn’t the inventor of the telescope. He was the first person to point it at the sky.

Some guys in Holland had invented the telescope years before, there isn’t any strangeness that one would appear in a painting by a Dutch painter just a few years before Galileo.

[JoeProBono]

[BenLurkin]

I remember reading this as a young lad......

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks BGHater.

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[SunkenCiv]

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[ApplegateRanch]

I don’t know if I should be surprised or not by their lack of comment on the height of the support.

Looks perfect for setting up on a balcony rail or roof rampart and ooking DOWN or OUT; not up, suggestive of military or other mundane usage. It would be very ackward and uncomfortable to use for sky watching.

[stayathomemom]

Is that a power cord at the base of the telescope?

[Robert A Cook PE]

An unusual puzzle.

(Personally, I’m going for the photoshop editing - You just know that those Renniie painters re-did “all” their first drafts several times, did a spell-check (for witches and whatevers) and then submitted their final version.

Besides, that font of telescope didn’t exist until Paintshop Pro Ver 1491.

[GraceG]

Clearly the Angels were delivering a telescope that was made by God.... and God is ahead of his time

[neverdem]

thanks, bfl