![]() Some of mankind’s earliest structures, such as the neolithic mounds of Brú na Bóinne in Ireland, the Nabta Playa stone circle in Egypt, and Stonehenge in Great Britain, were built according to the course of the moon, sun, stars and planets. Heliocentrism aside, many other painters, sculptors, photographers and other artists have focussed on celestial bodies, in part thanks to their beauty, symbolism, and associated sense of wonder. In an annotation in one of his notebooks, Leonardo da Vinci wrote ‘the sun does not move.’ This observation, predating the work of the Polish astronomer Copernicus by decades, indicates that it was this Italian Renaissance Man who first understood that the earth circles the sun, rather than vice versa. Artists may have a reputation for self absorption, yet it could well have been an artist who first realised that mankind really didn’t lie at the center of the universe.
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