The old constellations crowd the northern sky in gold and red

Plate 24 gives the northern sky as the ancients described it, without the earth beneath. The disc is crowded with figures: a pale Scorpio at the top, a golden Leo and a scarlet crayfish for Cancer at the lower right, a bear for Ursa Major at the centre, Bootes in blue, and around them Hercules, Pegasus, Andromeda, Perseus, Cygnus, Draco, Lyra and Aquila, each pricked with gold stars. A graduated zodiac band runs round the rim. This copy is the most heavily coloured of the three in the set: the constellation figures are filled in rose, blue, yellow and green, the title banners are sea-green, and the surrounding cloud is worked up in grey and blue.

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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