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 and the coasts of America Septentrionalis. Every star is a small gold rosette. Two winged trumpeters carry the Latin title on sea-green banners across the top, and below, a bare-chested man in a red kilt and a bearded elder in a blue tunic brace the sphere on their shoulders while robed onlookers watch from stone terraces at either side. This copy is the cooler of the two in the set, the globe worked in slate and teal above a blue sea, and it carries the Amsterdam imprint of Pieter Schenk and Gerard Valk 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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