Andreas Cellarius – Planisphaerium Copernicanum, 1661 | Giclée Print

The Copernican universe drawn as a machine: the sun in the middle, the earth carried round it on the third ring with the moon beside it, Jupiter with its four Galilean moons and Saturn out at the rim, and the zodiac closing the whole in a band of grey-violet cloud. Copernicus sits in the lower right corner with a globe; an older astronomer, dividers in hand, sits opposite. Plate 4 of Andreas Cellarius's Harmonia Macrocosmica, printed from a copper plate in Amsterdam by Johannes Janssonius and coloured by hand.

What this is. A giclée reproduction printed with pigment inks from the museum's own open-access scan of its copy. It is not a seventeenth-century print and is not sold as one.

Scale
Original: plate 51.00 × 43.34 cm — hand-coloured copper-plate print
50 × 50 cm / 19.7 × 19.7 in — reduced, 0.82× original. Image 42.00 × 35.69 cm.
70 × 70 cm / 27.6 × 27.6 in — original size, 1:1. Image 51.00 × 43.34 cm.

The print
Giclée on 200 gsm FSC-certified fine art paper, twelve pigment inks. White border, optical centre. The paper tone and the hand colouring of the original are kept, not corrected. Unframed. Shipped rolled in a tube.

Provenance
Andreas Cellarius (c. 1596–1665), Planisphaerium Copernicanum, sive systema universi totius creati ex hypothesi Copernicana in plano exhibitum, plate 4 of Harmonia macrocosmica, seu Atlas universalis et novus.
Amsterdam: apud Joannem Janssonium, 1661.

Where this comes from
The museum file, the measurements, and what we are allowed to sell: the record for this sheet.

Further reading
Why This Print Is Not Bigger