Astronomers of every age gathered under a sun and a crescent moon

This is the engraved frontispiece to the atlas. Four putti carry the title cartouche through banks of grey cloud, holding a banded celestial table above it, with a sun in gold rays at the upper left and a crescent moon with a human face at the upper right. Below, on a stone terrace before a classical facade, the astronomers are gathered: bearded men in ruffs, fur-trimmed gowns and red caps, one pointing upward with a long rod, another leaning forward to touch a blue armillary sphere with a pointer, and among them a seated woman in red and white cradling a small gilt armillary sphere while the man beside her holds up a graduated disc, with a terrestrial globe, a blue armillary sphere, books and a yellow wheel-instrument set out on the ground around her.

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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