Abstract

A reanalysis of the eight astronomical images that Johann Adam Schall von Bell incorporated in the first Chinese treatise on the telescope to illustrate the telescopic discoveries made by Galileo Galilei shows that they were borrowed from the works on telescopic astronomy by Galileo Galilei and Johann Georg Locher, a student of Christopher Scheiner. Except minor changes to both Galileo’s illustrations of the telescopic view of the moon and nebulae and Locher’s illustration of sunspots, Locher’s images about the phases of Venus and Jovian satellites were redrawn presumably to convey a clearer commitment to Tycho Brahe’s system of the world and most of the contents in Locher’s image of Saturn was replaced by Schall’s own observation. These changes seem to be the result of two important factors that confined the transcultural transmission of astronomical knowledge from Europe to China through the Jesuits in the seventeenth century, namely the official standpoint of the Catholic Church on the ongoing cosmological issues and the cultural tradition of Chinese astronomy.