Portraits of Barbara Müller and Johannes Kepler

What it is

These are two tiny oval portraits, each only a few centimetres across, originally painted in oil on copper. One shows Johannes Kepler and the other his first wife, Barbara Müller. This image is a black-and-white reproduction scanned from a modern biography of Kepler, not a photograph of the original paintings themselves.

Why it matters

The portraits record Kepler's marriage and family life during his time in Graz, before the religious troubles that later forced him to move. They show that Kepler, like other scholars of his time, had his likeness and his wife's preserved as a married couple, reflecting the social customs of the period.

Look closer

• What differences do you notice between how Kepler and Barbara Müller are dressed and posed?
• Why might a couple have paired miniature portraits like these made?
• What does the reproduction method (a scan from a book) mean for how reliable this image is as a historical source?