Mythic beasts of the northern sky wheel above a mapped earth

Plate 26 lays the constellations of the northern sky over a map of the northern earth, so that Draco winds in green around the pole while Ursa Major and Ursa Minor tread across Greenland, Spitsbergen, Iceland and the coasts of America Septentrionalis. Every star is a small gold rosette; a scarlet ring marks the Arctic Circle, Camelopardalis the camel-leopard walks below the pole, and further out Gemini appears as two children and Cancer as a bright red crayfish. Two winged trumpeters carry the Latin title on sea-green banners across the top of the sheet. Below, a bare-chested man in a red kilt and a bearded elder in a blue tunic brace the sphere on their shoulders, boys kneeling at their feet, while robed onlookers watch from stone terraces at either side. This copy is the darker of the two in the set, its globe worked up in deep olive and umber.

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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