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View at the museum ↗Celestial Map of the Northern Sky with the Signs of the Zodiac (Imagines coeli septentrionalis)
Albrecht Dürer1515
- Attribution
- Albrecht Dürer German, 1471-1528
- Medium
- Woodcut in black on ivory laid paper
- Physical dimensions
- Image: 43.2 × 43 cm (17 1/16 × 16 15/16 in.); Sheet: 58.4 × 46.3 cm (23 × 18 1/4 in.)
- Credit line
- Clarence Buckingham Collection
Museum metadata is available under CC0. Image availability and rights are separate; consult the source record.
Source rights statement: Public domain
View the museum record ↗From the museum
Maps of the heavens and earth were one of the first printed instruments to be turned into three-dimensional objects—as globes. These began with functional two-dimensional diagrams that were cut out in elongated globe-gore strips and pasted onto spheres. While Dürer’s maps of the northern and southern skies were not meant to be mounted in this way, they were copied hundreds of times for this purpose. Produced as a presentation gift along with a view of the terrestrial globe for a humanist advisor to Emperor Maximilian, the dual view depicts the heavens as if the viewer were observing them from space.
Description: Art Institute of Chicago · CC BY 4.0