A great grey globe of stars turning above two watching scholars

Plate 25 draws the northern sky on a great grey-brown globe seen from slightly below, its meridians ruled and its constellations laid over the land beneath. A scarlet crayfish for Cancer sits at the left edge, the long Hydra winds along the lower curve, and Cassiopeia, Cepheus, Cygnus, Aquila and Virgo are named across the disc, all pricked with gold stars. Scholars sit at the lower left with a globe and a book; at the lower right a second group works with a globe and an open book, one of them holding up a gilt instrument, and a church tower rises behind them at the left with a classical facade at the right. Putti hold the sea-green title banners against a blue sky.

Andreas Cellarius (c. 1596–1665) was a German-born Dutch cartographer and schoolmaster who spent most of his working life as rector of the Latin school in Hoorn. In 1660 the Amsterdam publisher Johannes Janssonius issued his Harmonia Macrocosmica, a folio atlas of twenty-nine engraved plates that set the competing world systems of Ptolemy, Copernicus and Tycho Brahe beside charts of the constellations and the motions of the planets. It was the last great decorative celestial atlas of the Dutch golden age, and its hand-coloured plates — dense with putti, banners and allegorical figures — were reissued by Gerard Valk and Pieter Schenk in 1708. Copies are held by the Library of Congress, the Universiteitsbibliotheek Amsterdam and the Royal Astronomical Society.

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