Sun-dogs, Astrology, and Apocalyptic Thought in the Italian Renaissance

This painting is breathtaking — especially when you consider that an artist painted the original in about 1535 — this is a copy from the first part of the 1600s. Entitled “Vädersolstavlan,” the Swedish name translates into “The Sun-Dog Painting” and may be the first artistic rendering of this celestial phenomenon. Sun-dogs happen in the sky when light from the sun refracts from ice crystals, causing the illusion of bright lights that mimic the look of suns. The technical name is parahelion, and there was a doozy of a sun-dog display on April 20, 1535, when seven suns appeared in the morning sky over Stockholm. The Protestant preacher Olaus Petri was convinced it was an astrological portent signifying the End Times, and displayed this painting in the city’s main church.

In fact, all throughout Europe during the first century and a half of the Protestant Reformation, both preachers and public believed that events in the heavens were directly showing the unspooling of prophecies from the Christian Book of Revelation. The great astronomer Tycho Brahe had observed the formation of a new star in 1572, and really thought he was witnessing the beginnings of the Apocalypse:

“In the end we have to acknowledge that this spectacle from God (the supernova he saw) the Creator of the whole World, has to excite our devout admiration more than anything else in Nature, and that it was decided by Him in the Beginning and now finally shown to the world while it is approaching its evening”.

The comets that appeared in 1577, 1596, 1607, and 1618, as well as a number of planetary conjuncions and eclipses, all fed into a great confirmation-bias that the End Days were nigh. The mass hysteria shows up in published sermons on the subject that ran the gamut of highbrow treatises to low-class pamphlets. For instance, some historians counted at least 3,000 cheaply produced publications in German alone on the topic of astrology and the coming Apocalypse between 1480-1630.