Was, in other words, his father’s corpse in that turret, too?

Then he realized:

Obviously, Prince Heinrich was trying, for whatever reason, to horrify him. And given what he knew about the Prince, and what he would learn subsequently, he should, in fact, have been horrified. The truth is I ought to have been horrified, the astronomer told Leibniz: “What I saw through that little iron-grated aperture should have horrified me.” But it did not horrify him. On the contrary—it amused him. He began to laugh; and not simply to titter like the virtuosi in the Great Hall or to burst into Margaretha’s scornful laughter but really to chortle, to laugh from the belly, to produce, that is, belly laughter. (“Have you noticed, Herr Leibniz, how our most celebrated scientists of the sentiments always possess the crudest understanding of laughter? I have seen laughter taxonomies that bundle together the giggle, the chortle, and the titter, or the chortle, the titter, the snicker, and the hoot. Even in Delft, where they have a superb understanding of tears, they do not distinguish between the whoop, the cackle, the guffaw, the hoot, and the hee-haw. Of course, the hee-haw has nothing to do with the hoot, and the whoop is not even a species of laughter at all! A man who confuses whimpering and weeping is rightly excluded from the circle of learned men, we demand very fine distinctions on the tragic side of life, yet someone who considers a hee-haw a hoot may still be regarded as an eminent authority on the nature of the world.”) At the time, and for a long time afterward, the astronomer could not figure out why the sight of his father’s gutted mechanical head sitting there aglow on a silver platter provoked in him this outburst of uncontrollable belly laughter. Maybe I am finally grieving, he thought, and the thought pleased him, he was actually relieved to find himself racked with grief, his grief hitherto had been all too controlled, too lucid, “I am always in my own head,” he welcomed this spasm of grief even if it happened to express itself as belly laughter. But in truth his laughter had little to do with grief. This he realized only recently. His laughter, he realized at last, decades after the fact, was merely “the laughter invariably provoked by exceptionally bad art.” The theatricality of the tableau Prince Heinrich had arranged, the utter artificiality of it, the melodramatic lighting, the (probably completely meaningless) allusion via the silver platter to the head of John the Baptist, all of which was meant to instill terror in the astronomer, for reasons he would begin to fathom shortly, provoked, instead, laughter. “He wanted I think to seem mad, but each of these aspects, and in particular the John the Baptist aspect, suggested, in fact, a surplus of sanity, of control, of intention, you see. There was something ineluctably sane about what I was seeing. The thought: I am seeing something so sane right now! That is what I thought as I peered through those iron bars, even if I didn’t know at the time that that’s what I was thinking. He wants me to see something insane, but I am seeing something sane! Sane, sane, I thought. The truly mad constantly try to make art, but they make only madness, the truly artful constantly try to make madness, but they make only art. He wants to seem insane, but in arranging in this pitch-black turret a tableau centered on my dead father’s salvaged and repurposed lead head, lit from within, probably in emulation of Caravaggio’s histrionic lighting techniques, if not in fact in direct imitation of Caravaggio’s Salome with the Head of John the Baptist, which hung as I knew in the North Wing, he shows himself to be sane, I thought, though I only realized that this was the thought I was thinking many years after the fact,” he told Leibniz. “He wishes to seem insane, he intends to come across as mad in my eyes, but the very wish, the very intention, and more than that the ability to execute his intention by means of a coherent set of artistic techniques, even entirely derivative ones, even wholly Caravaggesque ones, down to the absurd and probably meaningless John the Baptist reference, shows him to be sane, completely sane! Intention, Herr Leibniz, I am drawing your attention to the presence here of intention, intentionality, of reasoning about means and ends, and therefore of reason full stop. He wanted his artwork to do something to me! Peering through those iron bars, or rather peering between those iron bars, I probably thought: Merely by intending to make something horrific, he has made something ridiculous. He aims for the horror of the madman, but in so aiming he has achieved only the ridiculousness of the artist,” the astronomer said. “The ridiculousness of the visual artist.”