Besselei
The Bessel egg or (or the) Besselei how the artist Jürgen Goertz calls his expansive sculpture from 1989 ambiguous, is a monument to and a tribute to the significant astronomer Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel (1784 to 1846). It stands, surrounded by department stores, on the lively Hanseatenhof in the pedestrian zone of downtown Bremen .
Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel
→ Main article by Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel
As a young man, Bessel worked from 1799 to 1806 at Papenstrasse 6, a few steps from the current location of the work of art, as an assistant to a merchant. Since he intended to enter the overseas trade later, he acquired navigational skills, which at the time included angle measurements and sky observations. With his mathematical talent, but also an extraordinary visual acuity, he was soon fascinated by astronomy. In 1804 he met the astronomer Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers from Bremen , who was 26 years his senior , who recognized his talents and encouraged him so that Bessel was appointed as an inspector at Hieronymus Schröter's private observatory in nearby Lilienthal as early as 1806 . In 1810 the Prussian king appointed him director of the new Königsberg observatory in what was then East Prussia, where he worked for 36 years. His groundbreaking achievements included the first calculation of the distance of a fixed star by observing the fixed star parallax and such an accurate calculation of the size and shape ( Bessel ellipsoid ) of the slightly oval "globe" that it was one of the geodetic bases of the well into the 20th century Cartography stayed.
The artwork
The installation uses various materials (concrete, granite, metal strips, sheet brass, iron) to put several disparate motifs together like a collage . The conventionally placed bust on a narrow stele is designed according to contemporary portraits and can claim to resemble portraits, the combination of the stylized telescope with a square measure mentally connects two important devices of the geodesist and astronomer. Various circular and spherical elements point to the spheres and celestial bodies as objects of his research. The egg that gives it its name forms the bright white center. With ironic exaggeration, it is reminiscent of the shape of the earth calculated by Bessel (which, however, has a compressed shape, i.e. flattened at the poles, and not an elongated shape of an ellipsoid ).
proof
- ↑ The project began in 1986, was completed in 1989 and set up in 1990. ( Art in public space in Bremen , Bremen 1993, p. 362)
literature
- Wiltrud Ulrike Drechsel: History in Public Space. Monuments in Bremen between 1435 and 2001 . Bremen: Donat, 2011, p. 14f.
Web links
Coordinates: 53 ° 4 ′ 42.6 ″ N , 8 ° 48 ′ 16 ″ E