A broad ribbon spirals down the globe tracing a year of sun

Plate 17 wraps the earth in a single broad ribbon that spirals down across the globe from tropic to tropic, tracing the sun's apparent path through a whole year. The band is coloured in olive, brown and rose, and behind it a fine net of turquoise spiral lines fills the surrounding circle. The globe itself is mapped and pale, and the enclosing ring is lettered with the meridian, the colures and the zodiac. Putti rest on mauve clouds at the lower corners, and pale yellow-green banners carry the title at the top with the Amsterdam imprint of Pieter Schenk and Gerard Valk beneath the right-hand one.

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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