 employed various engravers to work on the plates of the atlas, but only two have signed their work: Frederik Hendrik van den Hove, 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 Jan Pieterszoon Saenredam. The current chart, which appears as Plate Four in the atlas, is unsigned.

This map depicting the Copernican solar system was a powerful argument for a heliocentric Solar System, emphasized visually with sharp rays that emanate from the sun in the center.  Prominence is also given to Jupiter’s four moons, whose discovery by Galileo Galilei in 1610 upended the principle of Aristotelian cosmology, which held that all heavenly bodies should circle the Earth. Seated at the lower right, surrounded by astronomical instruments and books, is Nicolaus Copernicus, while the figure at the bottom left is perhaps Aristarchus of Samos (f. 250 BCE), who is believed to have been the first to propose a heliocentric Solar System. 

Double-page engraved copperplate celestial chart, with contemporary hand-colour in full.

’s stunning ‘Harmonia Macrocosmica’, was the only celestial atlas published during the ‘Golden Age’ of Dutch 

. The atlas includes a total of twenty-one Baroque-style charts that represent the three competing astronomical models of the day: the Ptolemaic, Tychonic, and the Copernican. 

Nicolaus Copernicus’s ‘De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium’ (1543), which explained a heliocentric theory of the cosmos in which the earth orbited the Sun, remained a controversial work even a century later. 

’ depiction of Copernicus’s theory that all of the planets circle the Sun, including the earth, was therefore a bold choice. Cellarius emphasized Copernicun theories further by depicting the Moon as a satellite of the Earth, and Jupiter with its four known moons. The 

 ring, which used to represent the ecliptic of the Sun, now appears as the outermost ring of the Cosmos.

This map was included in Cellarius’s ‘Harmonia Macrocosmica’ of 1660, published by 

, who in the same year also included the work as the last volume in his own ‘

’ bold representation of the controversial theory of Nicolas Copernicus’s heliocentric, or Sun-centred cosmos.

Cellarius' Map of the Copernican Theory of the Cosmos