Monsignore Agucchi Reads a Letter: Sunspots, Secrecy, and Scientia in the Early Seventeenth Century

This chapter is concerned with a series of telescopic investigations of the sun undertaken by a network of observers assembled across Europe in the period 1611–1613. This network is represented by an enigmatic portrait of an all-but forgotten Italian cleric, Giovanni Battista Agucchi (1570–1632). Agucchi now usually appears (if he appears at all) as a footnote in the history of art or (more rarely) the history of science. But, in his lifetime, he was a powerful intellectual force in early seventeenth-century Rome. His unforgettable likeness, now preserved in York Art Gallery in the UK, opens a brief window into the ways in which one branch of scientia—astronomy—was collectively investigated in early modern Europe. The fanciful ‘device’ to which Agucchi is shown to be responding in his portrait is not a scientific instrument, but a tool which was even more fundamental to early modern scientific inquiry: a handwritten letter. As we shall see, the exchange of handwritten letters played a vital part in the weaving of that ‘net’ which, as John Donne speculated in his An Anatomy of the World (1611), had been ‘throwne upon the heavens’ by the ‘new Philosophy’ of Copernicus, Kepler, and, above all, Galileo.