Ribbons of orbit coil inward like a great flattened spring

Plate 3 draws the planetary spheres not as flat rings but as broad ribbons coiling inward, one inside the next, from Saturn at the outside down through Jupiter, Mars, the Sun, Venus and Mercury to the small mapped earth at the centre. Two small roundels sit in the lower corners, one lettered for the Ptolemaic hypothesis and one for Tycho's, in which the earth is the centre of the moon and the firmament but the sun of the other five planets. Putti hold the green title banners, and the Amsterdam imprint of Pieter Schenk and Gerard Valk is engraved beneath the right-hand one. This copy is coloured in gold and olive against a strong blue sky, with a pink and yellow zodiac ring.

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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