 True philosophers, those, that is, who understood that the universe was infinite, could discover more than this. The numberless, magnificent, blazing, celestial bodies revealed, to paraphrase Psalm 19:1 (KJV), many things about “the infinite excellence and majesty of their first principle and cause” (BOI I, 649–650). Together they formed a “picture, book and mirror in which we could gaze upon, read and contemplate the vestige, law and simulacrum” of God (BOL I.1, 203; BOI II, 27). The first of these analogies, that of painting, Bruno developed as follows. A masterpiece relied on using appropriately a range of colours, not just “gold and finest purple” (BOL I.1, 310, 312). Plotinus inspired the analogy (Enneads, III.2.11), but Bruno, as ever, gave it a distinctive twist. For Plotinus, it illustrated how the hierarchical arrangement of all things necessarily entailed a descent from perfect being to the absence of being, from the absolutely good to the not-good. In Bruno’s philosophy, no such hierarchy existed. Something abject was like a splodge of paint which, drab though it appeared on the palette, once applied, lent a painting the desired effect (BOL I.1, 312). In other words, accidents that they all were, things acquired ontological significance only insofar as they were part of God’s “perfect” image, the universe. As such, the latter was an epiphany incomparably more splendid and revelatory than that proferred by any individual, whether “Egyptian, Syrian, Greek or Roman” (BOL I.1, 205). The Syrian that Bruno had in mind was Jesus Christ, who was born in Bethlehem and bought up in Nazareth, both towns, as St Luke (2:2) mentioned in his account of the nativity, being located in what the Roman Empire at the time knew as Syria. It was the universe, not the first Adam or, as St Paul had called Jesus (1 Corinthians 15:45), the second Adam (Genesis 1:26; 2 Corinthians 4:4; Colossians 1:5; Hebrews 1:3), that was made in God’s “image”.