The Zodiac Through Art and History: Two Thousand Years of Celestial Symbolism
The twelve signs of the zodiac — the belt of constellations through which the sun appears to travel in the course of a year — have been depicted, interpreted, and encoded in art for at least three thousand years. From the circular zodiac carved on the ceiling of the Hathor temple at Dendera in Egypt (one of the oldest surviving circular astronomical maps, dating to approximately 50 BCE), through the medieval zodiac man who mapped the constellations onto the human body, through the woodcuts of 16th-century German printers and the baroque engravings of 17th-century astronomical atlases, to the horoscopic wheel of modern astrology — the zodiac has been the most persistent symbolic framework in Western civilization, outlasting empires, surviving the Copernican revolution, and continuing to organize the sky for a majority of the world's population who consult it today. The Dendera Zodiac, Louvre Museum (c. 50 BCE) — carved on the ceiling of a chapel in the Temple of ...