Andreas Cellarius, Harmonia Macrocosmica - ATLAS CELLARIUS
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Ein Blick in die Sterne: Die schönsten Himmelskarten der Geschichte
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van Gent, Dr. Robert
ATLAS CELLARIUS

jetzt nur noch EUR 49,99 statt früher EUR 100,00 !


Ein Blick in die Sterne: Die schönsten Himmelskarten der Geschichte
Das 17. Jahrhundert ist berühmt für seine prächtigen, häufig handkolorierten Atlanten. Zu den herausragendsten Himmelsatlanten zählt die 1660 in Amsterdam erschienene Harmonia Macrocosmica des deutsch-niederländischen Mathematikers und Kosmografen Andreas Cellarius (ca. 1596-1665). Auf 29 doppelseitigen Tafeln werden die Weltsysteme von Claudius Ptolemäus, Nikolaus Kopernikus und Tycho Brahe, sowie die Bahnen von Sonne, Mond, den Planeten und die Stellung der Sternbilder in verschiedenen Aspekten dargestellt. Viele der Tafeln sind in ihrem Entwurf und der Darstellung einzigartig: Astronomen, Allegorien, Putten beleben die Tafeln und eine üppige, prächtige barocke Verzierung schmückt die Bordüren. In unzähligen Details werden die Karten zu sprechenden Bildern. Zu Recht wird die Harmonia Macrocosmica ein Meisterstück des goldenen Zeitalters der Kartografie genannt und zählt zu den bedeutendsten Werken in der Geschichte der Astronomie.

A masterpiece from the Golden Age of celestial cartography
Andreas Cellarius. Harmonia Macrocosmica of 1660

From the dawn of humanity, the motions of the Sun, the Moon and the heavens must have incited people to admiration and study. The Sun and the Moon, the quintessential embodiments of day and night, already determined from very early on - long before the invention of writing - the three primary divisions of every calendar: the day, the month and the year. The constellations must also have been used for the regulation of the calendar at a very early stage in human history. The course of the Moon and its phases can be determined by simple observation, but the Sun's course across the heavens is obscured by the fact that sunlight overpowers the light of the stars that lie behind it. It is possible, however, to determine the position of the Sun in the celestial hemisphere by approximation, using those bright stars which rise in the east just before sunrise or set in the west just after sunset. In many ancient cultures, the most important moments in the agricultural year - for example, when it was time to sow or harvest - were indicated by the heliacal rising or setting of prominent stars or constellations. In the same way, the calendar - usually based on twelve months of 29 or 30 days that followed the phases of the Moon - was made to harmonize with the solar year of approximately 365 days by adding an intercalary month every couple of years.


The scientific description of the heavens
We owe the first scientific description of the heavens to the Greek astronomer Hipparchus of Nicaea, who was active on the island of Rhodes around 135 BC. According to a later tradition, the appearance of a new star - a nova or a comet - in the sky was supposedly the reason behind Hipparchus' decision to make a survey of the heavens. His original star catalogue has not survived, but can be substantially reconstructed from the surviving works of the Greek astronomer Claudius Ptolemy, who lived in Alexandria around AD 150. In his 13-volume Great mathematical handbook, later known as the Almagest, Ptolemy provides detailed instructions on how to calculate the positions of the Sun, Moon and planets along with an adapted version of Hipparchus' star catalogue. Ptolemy lists some 1,028 stars (with three duplicates), arranged in 48 separate constellations.


Ptolemy's world system
In addition to describing the constellations, the Almagest provides detailed information on calculating the positions of the Sun, the Moon and the planets. Ptolemy thereby proceeds from a geocentric worldview, according to which the Earth occupies a central, fixed position and the heavenly bodies revolve in circular motions around it. Since observations had already revealed that the Sun, Moon and planets did not revolve around the Earth at a uniform velocity, Ptolemy had to take refuge in a more complicated theory, developed around 200 BC by the Greek mathematician Apollonius of Perga, according to which the movements of the heavenly bodies were explained by a combination of two or more circular motions. Nevertheless Ptolemy's treatises would continue to exercise a great deal of influence on later Islamic and European astronomers. His scheme for the distances and dimensions of the heavenly bodies would be followed almost without alteration until the late of the 16th century.


The demythologization of the heavens
With the aid of the telescope, it was possible to see stars that were not visible to the naked eye and to determine their positions with greater accuracy. As a consequence, the number of known stars rose from about 17,000 in around 1800 to some 300,000 by around 1900. The number of constellations depicted on globes and in atlases also increased - no less than 99 constellations feature in the monumental Uranographia published by Johann Elert Bode (1747-1826) in 1801, for example. Over the course of the 19th century, however, the figures illustrating the constellations would slowly disappear from professional celestial atlases. Some of the newly formed constellations fell into disuse, but it would take until the beginning of the 20th century before there was any consensus concerning the number and limits of the constellations. At a meeting of the International Astronomical Union (IAU) in 1928, the number of constellations was officially fixed at 88.


The Harmonia Macrocosmica - Genesis, contents and appreciation
The publication of Andreas Cellarius' Harmonia Macrocosmica in 1660 forms the final chapter of an ambitious cartographic project initiated 25 years earlier by the Amsterdam publisher Johannes Janssonius (1588-1664), namely, the publication of an atlas in several volumes which described not only the surface of the Earth but the whole of Creation, including the cosmos and its history. The seeds of this plan had been sown nearly a century earlier by the renowned cartographer Gerard Mercator. In 1569, in the foreword to his Chronologia, Mercator stated his intention to publish an all-encompassing "cosmography", a multi-volume atlas that would describe not only ancient and modern geography, but also the seas, the cities of the world, the firmament and chronology. Mercator published the first four volumes of his atlas between 1585 and 1589, with a supplementary fifth volume being published by his son Rumold (c. 1545-1599) in 1595. Following Mercator's death, his project was taken up by a succession of publishers, but it would be Johannes Janssonius who finally turned it into reality. In 1636 Janssonius and Henricus Hondius published the first version of their Novus Atlas, featuring some 320 maps in four languages. In 1650 Janssonius added a fifth volume, a nautical atlas with supplemental maps of the eastern hemisphere. A further volume was published between 1658 and 1662 and included the cartography of the ancient world. With the addition of Andreas Cellarius' Harmonia Macrocosmica in 1660 and an eight-volume compilation describing a number of cities (published in 1657), Janssonius' "description of the world" - in the meantime entitled the Novus Atlas absolutissimus - was now complete in terms of the form originally envisioned by Mercator almost 100 years previously. In the foreword to his celestial atlas, which he dedicates to the English king Charles II, Andreas Cellarius explains that he originally drafted the plates and celestial maps contained within it solely for his own use, and for lovers of astronomy, but that after repeated appeals from the publisher, he had decided to make them available to a wider public.


Although planned over two volumes, only the first volume of the Harmonia Macrocosmica was actually published. It describes the heavens and the most important world systems, above all that of Claudius Ptolemy. In the second volume, the world systems of Nicolaus Copernicus and Tycho Brahe were to be handled in more detail, along with a discussion of solar and lunar eclipses and a description of new discoveries made since the invention of the telescope. The work is prefaced by a poem in praise of Cellarius by Johannes Christenius (1599/ 1600-c. 1672), professor of law at the Athenaeum Illustre in Amsterdam. The text consists of a long Praeloquium or foreword in which the history of astronomy is presented, followed by the actual text, in which the 29 folio plates contained in the work are discussed in detail. The majority of the plates represent the Ptolemaic, geocentric world system. Just one plate (8) reflects to the alternative geocentric system proposed by the Roman author Martianus Capella (5th century AD). This plate is derived from an illustration in the Leiden Aratea and for this reason wrongly attributed to Aratus. The Copernican system is dealt with in two plates, while the worldview of Tycho Brahe is depicted in three plates. A detailed description of these last two world systems was intended for the projected second volume. The position circles of the celestial and terrestrial spheres are presented in three plates, followed by five plates illustrating various astrological concepts and the motion and phases of the moon. The final eight plates are devoted to the constellations and the fixed stars. Two plates depict the constellations of the northern and southern celestial hemispheres in the traditional forms assigned to them by the Greeks, while another two depict the stars in the "Christian" constellations following the Coelum stellatum christianum by Julius Schiller.

The most spectacular plates, however, are those that show the Earth from four different perspectives, seen as if through a translucent sphere on which the constellations are drawn.

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