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.

An atlas of systems, not of stars. Cellarius did not set out to map the sky so much as to draw the competing pictures of it side by side — the earth-centred system of Ptolemy, the sun-centred one of Copernicus, the compromise of Tycho Brahe — each as a full-page plate, each argued in the same ornamental language. This is the one that turned out to be right, printed with the same care as the two that did not.

What this is. A giclée reproduction printed with pigment inks from the Zentralbibliothek Zürich's own open-access scan of its copy, shelfmark T 12. 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, Zentralbibliothek Zürich, T 12
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.

Where the measurement comes from. The library scanned the volume at 400 dpi, and that figure is written into the file itself. At that scale the printed border of the plate measures 51.00 × 43.34 cm on the Zurich copy. A second copy of the atlas, in the Städtisches Museum Schloss Rheydt, is catalogued at 51.1 × 43.1 cm to the plate mark; hand-made paper moves by about one per cent from copy to copy, and the two agree within that.

What is cropped and what is not. The print stops at the outer printed rule of the engraving, the same convention we use for the block edge of a Japanese woodcut. The embossed plate mark lies a few millimetres outside that rule and stays out, as does the wide paper margin of the atlas leaf. The rule itself wanders by up to 2 mm across the width, because the leaf is bowed where it was bound; the crop takes the outer envelope of it, so a little paper comes in where the rule sits inside. Nothing is cut into the engraving. The engraved plate number 4 stands in the lower right corner and stays in the picture.

The fold. The plate was printed on a sheet wider than the book and folded once to be bound. The fold runs vertically down the middle of the picture, it is in the library's file, and it prints. We do not retouch it out. It is what a plate in a bound atlas looks like after three and a half centuries.

On the borders. The plate is wider than it is tall and the sheet is square, so the margins cannot be equal. On the small sheet the image takes the house width, 84 % of the sheet: 4.00 cm at each side, 6.66 above and 7.65 below. On the large sheet the plate is printed at its own size, which leaves 9.50 cm at the sides, 12.40 above and 14.27 below. Both sit at optical centre, 1:1.15, not in the middle.

Why there is no bigger sheet. Resolution is not the limit here. The scan carries 8032 pixels across the plate, which at our 300 dpi floor would cover an image 68 cm wide. The sheet is the limit: the plate's proportion, 1.18 to 1, sits between the shapes we stock, and the square sheet holds it with even side margins where the next larger sheets are long rectangles that would leave some 15 cm of paper at either side. So the large sheet prints the plate at its own size and stops there.

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. Copper-plate print, coloured by hand — engraving and etching combined; the Zurich catalogue names the technique as etching.
Zentralbibliothek Zürich, shelfmark T 12; doi 10.3931/e-rara-89076.
Koeman, Atlantes Neerlandici, ed. Van der Krogt, vol. I (1997), pp. 513–516, no. 1:801B, variant bc [Zürich III].
Public domain. The library publishes its scan under the Public Domain Mark.

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.

The pair
Plate 1 of the same atlas draws the older, earth-centred system of Ptolemy, in the same hand and the same size. The two were made to be read against each other and we print both.

Further reading
Why This Print Is Not Bigger — how the file, not the sheet, sets the ceiling.