COPERNICO, NICCOLÒ. – Astronomer and canon, b. on 19 February 1473 at Thorn (Torun) in western Prussia to Niccolò and Barbara Watzelrode; d. at Frauenburg on 24 May 1543. After his classical studies, he also devoted himself to philosophy and astronomy at the University of Krakow, where he is found in 1491. He followed his uncle Luca Watzelrode to Ermland when the latter was appointed bishop there.
During this period he translated the letters of Theophylact Simocatta: the first Greek book translated into Latin in the land watered by the Vistula. In 1497, having received minor orders, he was appointed canon of Frauenburg (diocese of Ermland); but in the meantime he had gone to Italy (1496), where he had studied theology and canon law at Bologna and Ferrara, also attending the lectures of Domenico Maria Novara, an astronomer of distinction. In 1500 he lectured on astronomy at the Sapienza in Rome; finally, at Padua, on 31 May 1503, he received his degree in law. He also devoted himself to medicine and in fact practised this art in his homeland, where he is found in 1505. With a few modest instruments he established an observatory at Frauenburg, on a tower near the Cathedral, and alternated his astronomical observations with the various affairs to which he had to attend as a canon. From his study of the precession of the equinoxes, to which Novara had introduced him, and of the question of Easter, he was led to revise all the doctrines concerning celestial motions. Around 1530 he began drafting his principal work: De revolutionibus orbium coelestium libri sex, which he had preceded with an explanatory commentariolus. Cardinal Niccolò Schönberg, a Dominican, learned of it in 1536 and approved it, and Giovanni Gioachino Retico did so in 1539, publishing an abridgment of it; but the printing undertaken at Nuremberg was not completed until 1543, and C. had barely enough time to see the first copies when he was overtaken by death. C., who was always a faithful Catholic, wished to dedicate his work to Paul III, an ardent devotee of the astronomical sciences; however, it appeared preceded by a preface from the Lutheran Andrea Osiander, through which it was intended to suggest that C. had proposed his system as a purely simple hypothesis; the Lutherans, in fact, immediately thought that it was in conflict with the Bible.
As is well known, C., in opposition to the astronomical system of Ptolemy, then universally accepted in the schools, which placed the earth at the centre of the universe, upheld the heliocentric system, which placed the sun at the centre, around which the earth, with its satellite, revolved together with the other planets. Since Kepler had not yet discovered that the orbits of the planets were ellipses rather than circles, C.’s system presented certain difficulties, but it was far simpler and more persuasive than the exceedingly complicated Ptolemaic system. Nevertheless, C.’s system initially met with very limited acceptance; his work was printed at Nuremberg in 1543 by his faithful disciple Retico and at Amsterdam by Niccolò Müller in 1614 and 1630, and thereafter not again until 1854 and 1873 (at Leipzig, from the original manuscript). In Italy, too, it passed almost unnoticed until Galileo became its advocate, giving the system new support and clarification through his discoveries. – Vedi tav. XVIII.