Atlas Coelestis seu Harmonia Macrocosmica

Frederik Hendrik van den Hove was a Dutch engraver active in the later seventeenth century. This title page was designed for Andreas Cellarius’s Atlas Coelestis, also known as Harmonia Macrocosmica, first published by Joannes Janssonius in Amsterdam in 1660. The same title page was used again in the 1661 edition and in the later 1708 reissue by Gerard Valk and Pieter Schenk. This example belongs to the Valk and Schenk reissue, identified by the words apud G. Valk et P. Schenk on the hanging title cloth.

The title page introduces Cellarius’s celestial atlas through an allegory of astronomy, learning, and changing cosmological ideas. Classical ruins in the background suggest an older intellectual order giving way to newer systems of observation and mathematical explanation, associated especially with Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler, and the wider transformation of astronomy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the foreground, Urania, muse of Astronomy, sits among a gathering of astronomers and geographers with globes, instruments, and diagrams. Shirley identifies the seated figures in black at left and right as probably Tycho Brahe and Nicolaus Copernicus, though he notes that some identifications remain uncertain. The standing figures include Claudius Ptolemy, probably the Arab astronomer al-Battani, and a figure identified as Alphonso V of Portugal holding a heliocentric model. Shirley points out that this may be a designer’s error, since the model would more properly belong with Copernicus.

At the far right stands Philip Lansberg, pointing toward a celestial disc held aloft by putti with sighting cross-staffs. Lansberg had published Tabulae Motuum Coelestium in 1632, a work concerned with celestial motion. His presence connects Cellarius’s title page with the history of early modern astronomical debate, including the shift from circular to elliptical planetary motion. As a title page, it frames the atlas as a visual and intellectual survey of the heavens, bringing together classical astronomy, Islamic astronomical learning, Renaissance cosmology, and the newer observational astronomy of the seventeenth century.

Within the collection, this Valk and Schenk reissue can be compared with the earlier Janssonius issue of the same title page (259).