 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 Six in the atlas, is unsigned.

's hypothesis of the Solar System, which was an attempt to combine what he saw as the geometrical benefits of Copernican heliocentrism with the philosophical benefits of the Ptolemaic system. This map shows the Sun orbiting the Earth, and the planets as orbiting the Sun. 

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.

This map illustrates Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe’s theory of the Cosmos that shows an attempt to bring together Claudius Ptolemy’s geocentric (Earth-centred) Solar System and Nicolaus Copernicus’s competing heliocentric (Sun-centred) Solar System. Brahe agreed with the Copernican model that arranged the orbit of the five planets – Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn – around the Sun. However, he thought that Ptolemy was correct in that the Moon, Sun, and Stars orbited the Earth.

This map was included in Cellarius’s magnum opus, the ‘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’s representation of Tycho Brahe’s theory of the Cosmos, which combines elements from both Ptolemaic geocentric (Earth-centred) and Nicolaus Copernicus's heliocentric (Sun-centred) Solar System models.

Cellarius' Map of Tycho Brahe’s Theory of the Cosmos