What’s the Meaning Behind Copernicus’ Portrait with Lily-of-the-Valley?
It’s always intriguing to see what attributes people chose to be painted with in old portraits. After all, portraits were a big deal. Unlike modern photographs, even well-to-do people often had a single portrait of them painted throughout their lifetime. Some famous painters, like Rembrandt, produced a whole bunch of self-portraits, documenting their own face in all kinds of images, ranging from the solemn to the comical. But in normal cases, a portrait was a formal, important affair, and the way you were portrayed mattered. Astronomer Who Painted a Self-Portrait There aren’t many authenticated lifetime portraits of Nicolaus Copernicus. Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) was a mathematician, astronomer, and physician, famous for coming up with a mathematical model showing that the Sun was stationary, while the Earth revolved around it. While today he’s best known for his heliocentric model of the solar system, Copernicus was mainly active as a church canon and a physician durin...