Andreas Cellarius

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Andreas Cellarius was a Dutch cartographer, teacher, and writer.

He lived during the tumultuous period of the Reformation and the Thirty Year’s War. As a result, he had to flee from Heidelberg to Holland when the city was taken over by Catholics.

In his early years, he worked as a military architect and designed frontispiece prints. Cellarius’ greatest work was the ‘Harmonia Macrocosmica’ (1660), a sumptuously illustrated star atlas. The text depicted Claudius Ptolemy, Nicolaus Copernicus, and Tycho Brahe’s different models of the universe. The book was published in Amsterdam by Johannes Janssonius. In 1666 Janssonius included Cellarius’ celestial atlas in his ‘Atlas Novus’ (1666).

Vibrant portrait of Andreas Cellarius