Globes and Winds Title Page
Strasbourg: 1541

This item is sold. It has been placed here in our online archives as a service for researchers and collectors.

Ptolemy
Claudii Ptolemaei (after)
Globe and Winds Title Page
Hand-colored woodblock
Strasbourg: 1541
11 x 10 1/2 inches
Sold, please inquire as to the availability of similar items.

This title page from a Renaissance period atlas reviving the works of the Ptolemy shows the earth at the center of the universe, within its celestial circles and surrounded overall by the winds, represented by cherub heads blowing air from all directions.

Ptolemy (2nd Century A.D), an Alexandrian astronomer and cartographer who believed that the earth was the center of the Universe. In the Renaissance, the writings of Ptolemy, were rediscovered, and Ptolemaic maps based on his writings were published in Ulm and Strassbourg.

The astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543), published his important treatise Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium ("On the Revolutions of the Celestial Orbs"), in Nuremberg in 1543, the year of his death, in which he proposed the revolutionary theory that the sun was the center of the universe. This challenged the geocentrism of Ptolemy, and was particularly controversial in the Catholic Church because of its conflict with basic Christian teachings at that time. When Galileo (1564-1642) published his tract, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems of 1632 in support of Copernicus, the church included it in its Index Librorum Prohibitorum until the early 19th Century. By the end of the 16th Century, atlases by the great Dutch cartographers Ortelius and Mercator superceded the earlier Ptolemaic atlases of the late Renaissance.