The Celestial Map- Northern Hemisphere

The Celestial Map- Northern Hemisphere

Albrecht Dürer

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The ancient tradition of making celestial maps can be traced back, by way of Arabic sources, to classical ones. Dürer's two maps, this one and another of the Southern Hemisphere, derive from an Arabic type that depicted each hemisphere separately. His direct source was two richly decorated charts of the stars made in Nuremberg in 1503. Dürer's own additions to that design include the portraits of early astronomers in each corner: Aratus Cilix, Ptolemeus Aegyptius (Ptolemy), M. Mamlius Romanus (Marcus Manilius), and Azophi Arabus (Al-Sufi).

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Celestial Map- Northern HemisphereThe Celestial Map- Northern HemisphereThe Celestial Map- Northern HemisphereThe Celestial Map- Northern HemisphereThe Celestial Map- Northern Hemisphere

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.