The 17th-century masterpiece Harmonia Macrocosmica goes beyond mere cartography, says Mark Vernon

When our medieval forebears looked into the sky, they looked into the heavens. The enthralling experience is imagined for us by Owen Barfield in his book Saving the Appearances.

“If it is daytime, we see the air filled with light proceeding from a living sun, rather as our own flesh is filled with blood proceeding from a living heart. If it is night-time, we do not merely see a plain, homogeneous vault pricked with separate points of light, but a regional, qualitative sky, from which first of all the different sections of the great zodiacal belt, and secondly the planets and the moon (each of which is embedded in its own revolving crystal sphere) are raying down their complex influences upon the earth, its metals, its plants, its animals and its men and women, including ourselves…”

This image has now been discarded, to use the phrase of Barfield’s great friend CS Lewis. To look into the sky in the 21st century may provoke an experience of awe and wonder, but the sense of beauty, even connection, is compromised by an awareness of the incomprehensible emptiness that fills the space between the lights and the violent, nuclear processes that generate their luminescence. Some still practise astrology, though paradoxically they rarely look up, but instead look ahead – at a glowing screen of tables and figures.

So a question worth asking is why Taschen has decided to publish a sumptuously produced, richly animated atlas of the heavens replete with creatures and saints as well as constellations and stars? Surely the Harmonia Macrocosmica, created by Andreas Cellarius in the mid-17th century, belongs to a lost era? Indeed, even at the time astronomers found little practical use for it as it doesn’t carry accurate details of celestial positions. Further, the days when an astronomer might also be an astrologer, and therefore glad of the contemplative power of the maps, were numbered.

Part of the answer lies in the Harmonia Macrocosmica’s sheer aesthetic appeal, which is considerable. The atlas is regarded as a masterpiece from the Golden Age of Dutch cartography. The beauty of the plates, enhanced by the large scale Taschen deploys, is undeniable. But I think there is a subtler force at work, raying from within its enchanting pages.

The maps show the heavens according to various projections. First is the Ptolemaic model, which was developed in Ancient Greece, and places the Earth at the centre of things. The Sun, Moon and stars revolve around us – the plate also including a feature that I love: learned philosophers, surrounded by books and globes, sit alongside the spheres as if positioned outside of the cosmos, neutrally looking on. That objectivity is something that developed with early modern science, too. So, although the geocentricism of the Ptolemaic model was replaced by heliocentrism, which the Harmonia Macrocosmica also embraces wholeheartedly, Cellarius felt the older model worth including. The question is why?

Barfield offers a theory, contained in the title of his book. The expression “saving the appearances”, which goes back to Ancient Greece, describes the old way of doing science. A theory of, say, the heavens could be accepted if it accounted for what was observed, though no one back then thought to presume that their hypothesis was the only option, let alone the only one that was correct. This is why, although the Ptolemaic model was most commonly used because its mathematics was best understood, heliocentrism was also discussed in the ancient world, notably by Aristarchus of Samos in the third century BC.

The difference made by Copernicus and then Galileo in particular is not heliocentrism per se. Rather, modern science sought not only to save the appearances but to insist that one hypothesis was right. Galileo’s real innovation when he apocryphally uttered of the Earth, “And yet it moves”, was a theory about theories. Ultimate truth no longer resided in the ineffable mind of God, therefore attracting multiple hypotheses, but in the inquiring mind of Man, who could decide right from wrong.

The shift was momentous. If the correct hypothesis is a mathematical hypothesis, which excludes ideas about the divinity of the stars, then perhaps the cosmos speaks not in a living language but robotically follows the abstractions of mathematics. A reproduction of the Harmonia Macrocosmica today, then, has a nostalgic feel: its pages are at once beautiful and melancholic, a record not only of Dutch art and early modern science but of a lost participation. There was a time when the night sky was not only a source of amazement but of extrasensory links and heavenly threads. William Blake called them “fibres of love”.

Cellarius Harmonia Macrocosmica: The Finest Atlas of the Heavens, with introduction by Robert van Gent (Taschen, £125)

This article is from Idler #107.

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