Eight moons circle a clouded earth under two suns

Plate 19 sets the earth in a ring of dark cloud at the centre of the sheet and turns eight moons around it, each drawn half in shadow and lettered with its phase — new moon, crescent, half, gibbous, full. A radiant sun with a human face burns at the top of the plate, a second sun-face at the right sends out a fan of fine ruled sight-lines, and a table of lunar phases is engraved in the lower left corner. Putti carry the two title banners with the Amsterdam imprint of Pieter Schenk and Gerard Valk beneath. This copy is washed throughout in deep rose, so that the rays behind the moons read as a pink sky rather than gold.

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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