A lattice of coloured lines laid over the underside of the world

Plate 15 lays a lattice of aspect lines — trines, squares and sextiles in green, red and yellow — across a polar map of the earth lettered as the lower hemisphere of the world. Around it run rings of lettering naming the conjunctions and oppositions of the planets under the same sign and under two signs, and outside those a zodiac band in rose and yellow with the twelve figures. Two fan-shaped diagrams sit in the lower corners, one for the parallaxes of the planets and one for their conjunctions. Putti fly in blue cloud at the corners, and the Amsterdam imprint of Pieter Schenk and Gerard Valk is engraved beneath the right-hand banner.

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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