New X-ray imaging has revealed that a ring of secret skulls originally encircled a depiction of the 16-century English mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, occult philosopher, imperialist, and adviser to Queen Elizabeth I John Dee – by artist Henry Gillard Glindoni. Glindoni had been forced to censor the image when he created it in the 19th-century, disguising the rich occult symbology in order to transform it into a more scientific depiction. Hyperallergic.com reports: The discovery was made in research for Scholar, Courtier, Magician: The Lost Library of John Dee, opened this week at the Royal College of Physicians (RCP) in London. In our previous coverage of the exhibition, curator Katie Birkwood explained that in Tudor England, “the distinctions between magic and natural philosophy — as the subject we now think of science would have been termed then — were not nearly so clear-cut” as they are today. The alteration of the painting, from a vivid black magic ritual to a scene more suggestive of a scientific demonstration, likewise represents the tension in Dee’s identity between being a man of science and one of the occult. As in Joseph Wright of Derby’s“The Alchemist Discovering Phosphorus” (1771), where the bright light of the chemical reaction of phosphorus is framed as a supernatural act, the division between the two [...]