Two Eighteenth-Century Hand-Colored Celestial Atlases
Andreas Cellarius’s exquisite Dutch celestial atlas is hand-colored throughout in rich hues of blue, pink, purple, and yellow, from its full-page allegorical frontispiece to its twenty-nine folded leaves of masterful engravings executed by Peter Schenk and Gerard Valk. Only the final full-page engraving and subsequent map of the constellations were left uncolored. This exquisite book transports the reader out of the earthly sphere in its visual study of astrology and astronomy, depicting the various cosmographical models of prominent astronomers, juxtaposing Judeo-Christian alternatives to each of the canonical pagan Greco-Roman constellations, and delineating in breathtaking detail the waxing and waning of the moon.
The volume’s frontispiece beautifully encapsulates the capacity of this work to blend the terrestrial and the celestial, the ancient pagan and the early modern Christian, ancient philosophical verities and latter-day science. In it, a group of philosophers and scientists from the ancient world and the Scientific Revolution sit personified in a classical Roman scene as they contemplate the starry universe that floats above them—a prospect complete with sun and moon, and a small host of angelic cherubs. Strewn all around are early astrological instruments, including a globe, compasses, armillary spheres, astrolabes, a zodiac wheel, and, of course, books.
The engravings that follow walk the reader through the Ptolemaic, Copernican, and Tychonic imaginings of the cosmos and their respective planetary orbits and solar and lunar cycles. These culminate in an incredibly robust and provocative Christian reimagining of the pagan constellations. Prophets and evangelists from the Old and New Testament float through the sky, while Jason’s Argo is replaced by Noah’s Ark in an elaborate imitation of Julius Schiller’s earlier Coelum stellatum Christianum (1627).
If Cellarius’s project appears grand, Johann Gabriel Doppelmayr’s allied effort at a composite plate-book celestial atlas is positively monumental. Preserved in an early eighteenth-century marbled binding, this vast portfolio tour de force presents the would-be star-gazer with thirty hand-colored engraved plates. Greens, pinks, yellows, reds, blues, purple, and gold decorate every page of this visually breathtaking book as it marries the allied aspirations of scientific truth to its precise graphic illustration—the two pillars of erudite publication throughout the Scientific Revolution. Like Cellarius, Doppelmayr’s work rehearses the preceding two hundred years of astronomical knowledge, from Copernicus and Brahe to Kepler and Newton, among a host of others.
Perhaps the boldest statement in this hand-colored volume is the plate depicting the triumph of the Copernican heliocentric system. It features a radiant golden sun bursting forth from the center of the engraving, surrounded by the twelve signs of the zodiac and a gorgeous deep-blue border featuring playful putti playing with complex astronomical instruments among the floating clouds.
Part of the excitement of Doppelmayr’s work lies in the intricacies of his plates. These are not simply reproductions of the theories of great scientific minds. They also relay rich corpora of astronomical data distilled in minute and compact numerical tables. Across all four corners in two engravings of the classical constellations appear faithful representations of the major astronomical observatories in chronological order, from Tycho’s Uraniborg and Louis XIV’s Paris observatory, onwards to Greenwich, Copenhagen, Kassel, and Berlin. Many of these would continue to evolve into Europe’s first modern research institutions and transform the observational and empirical discoveries of the Scientific Revolution into distinct academic disciplines within the physical sciences.
—Kelsey Champagne, Earle Havens
Full Citation
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Bibliography
Kathleen M. Crowther and Peter Barker, “Training the Intelligent Eye: Understanding Illustrations in Early Modern Astronomy Texts,” Isis 104:3 (2013), 429–70; Volker R. Remmert, Picturing the Scientific Revolution (Saint Joseph’s University Press, 2011), esp. 187–92; Nick Kanas, Star Maps: History, Artistry, and Cartography (Praxis, 2007), esp. 191–94.
