COSMOGRAPHIA

Before humanity learned to measure the distances between stars, it told stories about them. Before it could calculate the movement of planets, it gave their light the names of gods. The Sun had a face, the Earth stood at the centre of the known world, and geometric forms were regarded as the fundamental principles of the universe. Knowledge arose not only from observation, but also from imagination. Myths and experience, philosophy and astronomy, symbols and reality existed side by side as different expressions of the same desire: to understand the world.

Every civilisation developed its own cosmography. It was not merely a map of the Earth or the heavens. Cosmography was an image of the world in its entirety, an attempt to connect what people could see with what they could not explain. It was a way of orienting oneself within a reality that has always exceeded human experience.

When Sebastian Münster published his monumental work Cosmographia in 1544, he was not simply creating an atlas of the known world. His book united astronomy, geography, history, natural sciences, architecture, and legend into a single vision of reality. It emerged at a time when fields of knowledge had not yet been divided into separate disciplines and reality was understood as an interconnected whole.

A similar mode of thought found an extraordinary expression several decades later in Rudolfine Prague. Astronomers, mathematicians, natural philosophers, artists, and alchemists shared the conviction that understanding arises through the search for connections between different domains of knowledge. One of the key figures of this intellectual environment was Tadeáš Hájek of Hájek, whose work helped shape the character of contemporary learning.

Cosmographia is therefore not merely the title of a historical book. It denotes a way of thinking that seeks not to divide the world into separate disciplines, but to understand the relationships that connect them. It is precisely this tradition to which Vladimír Škoda and Jan Dotřel turn.

Vladimír Škoda belongs to a generation of artists whose work cannot be separated from a lifelong search for the fundamental principles underlying our conception of the world. Throughout his practice, the sphere appears as a planet, an eye, a mirror, and a model of the universe. It is a symbol of perfection and infinity, but also an instrument that transforms the very act of seeing. Within its polished surface, surrounding space bends and loses its apparent certainty. The viewer observes the world while simultaneously becoming part of the image being observed.

Geometry represents one of the means through which humanity has sought, for centuries, to grasp the order of the cosmos. The Platonic solids that appear throughout the exhibition are not historical references but active tools for reflecting on space, harmony, and proportion.

An equally significant aspect of Škoda’s work is its dialogue with the histories of art, architecture, and thought. In works dedicated to Jan Blažej Santini-Aichel and Paul Cézanne, he turns to figures who, like astronomers, mathematicians, and philosophers, sought the hidden structure of reality. Santini found order in architectural geometry and in the relationships between light, number, and space. Cézanne pursued an image of reality grounded in its internal structure and elementary forms. What links Škoda to them is neither style nor historical continuity, but a shared conviction that the world is not a random collection of things.

Jan Dotřel explores the ways in which human beings have imagined, named, and inscribed these structures into cultural memory. The history of science, the archaeology of knowledge, natural sciences, and mythology appear in his work not as separate disciplines, but as different ways through which humanity has constructed an image of its place within the cosmos.

Nucleus, a halved and glowing iron core, directs attention toward the Earth’s interior—to a place hidden from human sight no less than distant stars. It recalls the experimental traditions of early modern scholars who sought to understand nature through observation and experiment. The incandescent mass is not merely a physical phenomenon but a symbol of the primordial energy from which the forms and structures of the world emerge. A gaze into the planet’s interior becomes, at the same time, a gaze toward the origins of humanity’s desire to know.

The triptych dedicated to Helios, Surya, and Utu brings together three images of the sun across cultures and histories. The Greek Helios crossed the sky in a chariot drawn by fiery horses. The Indian Surya embodied light, knowledge, and cosmic order. The Sumerian Utu was among the oldest solar deities in human history. Three different cultures, three different worldviews, and one shared necessity.

Dotřel does not assemble portraits of ancient gods. He assembles fragments of cosmographies that enabled people to orient themselves within a reality that exceeded their immediate experience.

The exhibition emerges from the long-standing collaboration between curator Miroslava Hájek, Vladimír Škoda, and Jan Dotřel. For more than fifty years, Hájek has been dedicated to presenting Czech art in Italy and has consistently followed artists whose work transcends the boundaries of individual disciplines. The project acquires an additional symbolic dimension through her familial connection to Tadeáš Hájek of Hájek. A figure who stood at the origins of one of the most remarkable periods of European knowledge thus becomes part of the dialogue opened by the exhibition.

Cosmography was never merely a description of the world. It was an attempt to understand the connections between things that, at first glance, seem distant from one another. That effort has never disappeared. It has only changed its forms.