The Albrecht Dürer or should that be the Bernhard Walther House?

On Saturday I did my history of astronomy tour of Nürnberg for some readers of this blog who were visiting the city[1]. As usually it ended at Nürnberg’s biggest tourist attraction the Albrecht Dürer House. There are of course good reasons for including Nürnberg’s most famous artist in such a tour, as readers of this blog should know. He wrote and published the very first printed maths book in German and was the artist involved in creating the first every printed European star maps. However this is another reason for including this building in a history of astronomy tour. Before it became the Albrecht Dürer House it had been the Bernhard Walther House and this was one of the reasons that motivated Dürer to purchase it. But who, I hear you say, was Bernhard Walther?

Bernhard Walther (Albrecht Dürer) House on Tiergärtentor Nürnberg
Photo: Monica Weidemann
Source: Wikipedia Commons

Bernhard Walther was born in Memmingen in Bavaria in 1430. The first really reliable fact we have about his life is when he became a citizen of Nürnberg in 1467; remember Nürnberg was an independent city-state in the fifteenth century. He was the general manager of the Nürnberg trading post of the Memmingen merchant traders the Vöhlin-Welser-Company. When Regiomontanus came to Nürnberg in 1471, he and Walther became friends and Walther became his astronomical assistant and companion. The accounts that claim that Walther was Regiomontanus’ patron are false, as are also the claims that the two of them built an observatory financed by Walther. They carried out their astronomical observations with portable instruments out in the streets. As well as astronomy Walther apparently learnt Greek from Regiomontanus, who had learnt the language whilst a member of Cardinal Bessarion’s household in Italy. We know of Walther’s abilities in the ancient language because they are mentioned in an ode that Conrad Celtis, the so-called arch humanist, wrote in his honour.

Regiomontanus had come to Nürnberg, according to his own account, to reform astronomy in two ways; firstly by starting a new programme of astronomical observations to replace those of Ptolemaeus corrupted by centuries of copying and recopying in manuscripts and secondly by printing and publishing new editions of the astronomical literature cleared of their errors through careful philological editing. Regiomontanus had chosen Nürnberg for his programme because the city made the best scientific instruments and because of its extensive communications network being aware of the fact that his programme was only achievable with the active assistance of other European astronomers. In an age without postal services, Nürnberg, as a major European trading city, had a private communications system second only to that of Venice.

Walther assisted Regiomontanus in both of his reform endeavours but they had only succeeded in publishing nine items, including the publishing house’s ambitious publication programme, when Regiomontanus again left Nürnberg in the direction of Rome to answer the Pope’s call to work on a calendar reform in 1475. Regiomontanus never returned from that journey, dying in Rome in 1476, presumable during some sort of epidemic. Walther did not continue the publishing endeavour, although he bought up Regiomontanus extensive collection of manuscripts, but he did carry on making a series of basic simple astronomical observations for the next almost thirty years. This was the first such series of astronomical observations carried out in Early Modern Europe, making Walther to an important if minor figure in the history of astronomy.

As the general manager of the trading company Walther occupied a house on the West side of the market place in Nürnberg, today Market Place No. 11. The original hose was destroyed in the Second World War.

Walther’s trading depot was on the west side of the Nürnberg market place, next door to the right of where the Körn & Berg bookshop now stands.

When he finally retired, seventy years old, he sold the house on the market place and bought the house on Tiergärtentor (The Zoo Gate) in 1501, which is now known as the Albrecht Dürer House. Walther substantially rebuilt the house adding the whole of what is now the top floor. He also had a small window let into the south gable with a stone window ledge; he used this window to make his astronomical observations resting his observing instruments on that stone ledge, this was his observatory. We know that Walther had this window constructed because in the document with which the city council gave permission for its construction, Walther had to give a guarantee that he wouldn’t empty his chamber pot out on to the roof of the neighbouring building.

Walther House with Observatory Window in the south gable
Photo: Nora Reim
Source: Astronomie in Nürnberg

Walther’s observation programme was comparatively simple and consisted largely of regularly determining the altitude of the Sun, observing eclipses and determining the positions of the planets during conjunctions etc. The latter set of observations leads to the assumption that the observations were principally for use by astrologers. This is not surprising as Regiomontanus was a practicing astrologer, with a very good reputation, whose stated intention in reforming astronomy was in order to improve astrological predictions. He claimed that such predictions were often wrong because the astronomical data on which they were based was inaccurate. Three of Walther’s observations found their way into Copernicus’ De revolutionibus, although we don’t know how they got there. Copernicus falsely attributes part of the used data to Johannes Schöner. In 1544 Schöner did publish Regiomontanus’ and Walther’s observations in his Scripta clarissimi Mathematici M. Joannis Regiomontani. Walther’s observation were, for their time, highly accurate only to be first superceded by those of Tycho Brahe at the end of the century.

Another little known Nürnberg astronomer, Conrad Heinfogel, referred to himself as a pupil of Bernard Walther and it was Heinfogel who provided the astronomical knowledge for Dürer’s star maps.

Largely forgotten today Walther was well known and highly regarded by his contemporaries and the astronomical community down to Tycho and Kepler, Tycho using Walther’s observations to check against his own. Walther died in 1504 and in 1509 Albrecht Dürer bought the house on the Tiergärtentor, partially because being himself a big fan of the mathematical sciences he desired to own Walther’s house. At the same time he also acquired ten manuscripts out of the Regiomontanus/Walther collection including an Elements of Euclid.

If you are ever in Nürnberg go round to the back of the Dürer house and you can see Walther’s observatory for yourself. However please be quite when doing so as the people who live next door get really pissed off with the tourists and the noise that they make.

[1] Any readers of the blog who visit Nürnberg are welcome to the same tour, you just need to arrange it in advance; all you have to do is buy me lunch at the end of it. A low price of a highly entertaining and educational tour that lasts between three and four hours!