Dessous De Verre En Grès Map of Christian Constellations, Southern Skies

Vintage illustration Renaissance era astronomy and celestial image featuring Noah's arc and angels. An antique star chart of the sky, Map of the Christian Constellations, the southern skies as depicted by Julius Schiller (c. 1580-1627), from The Celestial Atlas, or The Harmony of the Universe by Andreas Cellarius. Andreas Cellarius (c.1596-1665) was a Dutch-German cartographer, best known for his Harmonia Macrocosmica of 1660, a major star atlas, published by Johannes Janssonius in Amsterdam. Julius Schiller was a lawyer from Augsburg, Germany, who like his fellow citizen and colleague Johann Bayer published a star atlas in celestial cartography. In the year of his death, Schiller, with Bayer's assistance, published the star atlas Coelum Stellatum Christianum which replaced pagan constellations with biblical and early Christian figures. Specifically, Schiller replaced the zodiacal constellations with the twelve apostles, the northern constellations by figures from the New Testament and the southern constellations by figures from the Old Testament.