Gheyn, Jacobus de

Arataea, sive Signa Colestia. Amsterdam: Joannes Janssonius, 1652



Folio (10⅞ x 7⅝ in.; 276 x 194 mm). 44 engraved plates, the last folded; paper lightly browned, some tiny spots and two worm punctures in title, marginal foxing on plates 2 & 21, plate 22 bound inverted, small section in blank margin of title mended. Eighteenth-century white vellum, manuscript title on spine; green silk ties gone, small tears in backstrip.

Hollstein VII, 119, 51-95 (citing the 1621 edition); Warner, Sky Explored, p. 93, 1b

The Phaenomena of Aratus, along with its three ancient commentaries, was regularly reprinted in the sixteenth century with Hyginus and other ancient astronomical texts. In 1600 Hugo Grotius published a beautiful edition of the Arataea alone motivated by his acquisition of an illuminated ninth-century manuscript of Aratus (now Leiden University, Ms. Voss. Lat. Q79), in the Germanicus Caesar version. Grotius employed the engraver Jacobus De Gheyn to convert the manuscript paintings into engravings, and these were incorporated into the printed book. These are the finest constellation figures printed to date, and they were to have a long-lasting influence on celestial iconography, since De Gheyn's engravings served as inspiration, and occasionally as explicit models, for many of the constellation figures in Bayer's Uranometria.

This is the third edition of these engravings which first appeared without text in 1621.