Another web site about Tycho, also with a picture.

Tycho was also known as "the man with the golden nose" because, having lost the tip of his nose in a duel, he crafted a replacement made of gold-plated brass. Click here for a portrait showing Tycho's distinguishing feature

In the humorous section "Anti Gravity" of the Scientific American of February 1999, (page 29) Steve Mirsky joked about it: "...and the noseless man in question is the great Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe. So how did he smell? Probably pretty bad: daily showers were still a few centuries off, and there was indeed something rotten in Denmark."