 employed various engravers to work on the plates of the atlas, but only two have signed their work: Frederik Hendrik van den Hove is author of the frontispiece, and Johannes van Loon, who engraved ten charts. All of the designs of the classical constellations were taken from the ones created by Dutch Mannerist artist and engraver Jan Pieterszoon Saenredam (1565-1607). The current chart, which appears as Plate Four in the atlas, is unsigned.

This map depicting the Copernican Solar System was a powerful argument for a heliocentric Solar System, emphasised visually with sharp rays that emanate from the Sun in the centre. Prominence is also given to Jupiter’s four moons, whose discovery by Galileo Galilei in 1610 upended the principle of Aristotelian cosmology, which stated that all 'Heavenly' bodies should circle the Earth. 

Seated at the lower right, surrounded by astronomical instruments and books, is Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543), while the figure at the bottom left is a possible depiction of Aristarchus of Samos (f. 250 BCE), who is believed to have been the first to propose a heliocentric Solar System. 

The Sunderland Collection

Andreas Cellarius’s stunning ‘Harmonia Macrocosmica’ was the only celestial atlas produced during a celebrated era of Dutch publishing between 1570 and 1670. It is quite possibly the finest celestial atlas ever realised. This is one of twenty-one sumptuous Baroque-style charts that majestically represent the three competing astronomical models of the day: the Ptolemaic, Tychonic, and the Copernican.

Nicolaus Copernicus’s ‘De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium’ (1543), which explained a heliocentric theory of the cosmos in which the Earth orbited the Sun, remained a controversial work even a century later. Andreas Cellarius’s depiction of Copernicus’s theory that all of the planets circle the Sun, including the Earth, was therefore a bold choice. Cellarius emphasised Copernican theories further by depicting the Moon as a satellite of the Earth, and Jupiter with its four known moons. The Zodiac ring, which used to represent the ecliptic of the Sun, now appears as the outermost ring of the Cosmos.

This map was included in Cellarius’s magnum opus ‘Harmonia Macrocosmica’ (1660) which was published by Johannes Janssonius, who in the same year also included the work as the last volume in his own ‘Atlas Maior’.

Andreas Cellarius’ bold representation of the controversial 1543 theory of Nicolas Copernicus’s heliocentric, or Sun-centred Cosmos.

Cellarius's Map of the Copernican Theory of the Cosmos