Celestial Atlases: Mapping the Sacred Sky
Before photography, before computerized star charts, before the reduction of the sky to coordinates and magnitudes — astronomers and their artist-collaborators created celestial atlases of extraordinary beauty. These were not merely scientific documents. They were theological statements: maps of a sky understood as the visible face of divine order, in which the constellations were not random patterns but mythological presences, and in which the movements of the planets were the movements of cosmic intelligences. The great celestial atlases of the 16th and 17th centuries — Johann Bayer's Uranometria (1603), Andreas Cellarius's Harmonia Macrocosmica (1660), and their predecessors and successors — were among the most ambitious publishing projects of their age, commissioning the finest engravers to render a sky that was simultaneously scientific data and sacred image. Cellarius — Copernican heliocentric system, Harmonia Macrocosmica (1660); the radical repositio...