An armillary sphere of banded rings closing round the earth

Plate 7 draws the earth inside an armillary sphere. The globe at the centre is mapped and lightly coloured; around it run the great rings of the sky — the horizon in pale blue, the meridian and the zodiac in broad bands of yellow, teal and olive carrying small figures of the signs, the tropics and polar circles in fine ruled lines of red and green. Zenith and nadir are lettered at the top and bottom. The sphere floats in a sky of mauve and grey cloud filled with putti, and two larger figures sit at the lower corners, one holding a chart, the other a sceptre with a gilt armillary sphere beside 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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