Noah's ark sails the sky where the old constellations stood

Plate 22 is the first half of Julius Schiller's Christian sky. Noah's ark rides low in the disc and a second great ship crosses the upper half, while saints and apostles — Thomas, Benedict, the harping King David, the Magi — take the places of the pagan constellations, each named in small lettering and pricked with its stars. Two small polar circles are set into the lower corners. The hemisphere is bound by a red and cream graduated ring and surrounded by grey cloud in which angels and putti fly, several in green and rose drapery. 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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