December 27, 2025 · 6:54 am

After Newton and Babbage, today we look at the surviving images of the astronomer Johannes Kepler (1571–1630). Kepler was born the son of an innkeeper’s daughter and a mercenary, who deserted his family when Johannes was just five years old. This is not the environment in which parents have portraits painted of their children. In fact, there are very few portraits of Johannes Kepler at all and we don’t know the source of most of them and several are clearly produced posthumously and we don’t know is they’re are based on an existing image or are just the artist’s imagination.

There is one contemporary painting by the German artist Hans van Aachen (1552–1615), a leading representative of Norther Mannerism. It is described as the portrait of a young man thought to be Johannes Kepler but the attribution is not certain.

Hans van Aachen’s supposed portrait of Kepler

There is another portrait in the Galleria degli Uffizi in Florence, which is labelled Johannes Keplerus, but neither the artist nor when it was painted is known. It is, however, attributed to the seventeenth century.

Johannes Kepler portrait by an unknown artist

There is a nineteenth century engraved portrait by the English watercolourist and architectural draughtsman Frederick Mackenzie (1787–1854), which is now in the Smithsonian Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology. The caption says From a Picture in the Collection of Godefrey Kraemer Merchant of Ratisbon. Ratisbon is an English alternative name for Regensburg the city in which Kepler died and was buried.

The Dibner also has a copy of the Uffizi Kepler engraving, as well as an undated engraved portrait in profile.

Also in the Dibner is an engraving of a portrait of Johannes Kepler from a 1620 painting that was given to the Strasbourg Library in 1627, artist unknown. There is a painting from 1910 based on the engraving in the Kepler-Museum in Weil der Stadt, Kepler’s birth-place, by the German painter August Köhler (1881–1964).

1910 painting boy August Köhler based on the above engraving

Amongst all this doubt about the various portraits of Kepler the most surprising is the fact that a very impressive portrait in the possession of a Benedictine monastery in Kremsmünster, Austria, that was thought to be Kepler painted in 1610 is now thought to have been first painted in the nineteenth century and probably not Kepler at all. I myself have used it several time on Kepler posts in the past but no longer.

Nineteenth century portrait supposedly of Johannes Kepler claiming to be a copy of a lost original from 1610. Now considered to be a forgery and not Kepler at all.