Page 215 - Art In The Age Of Exploration (Great Section on Chinese Art Ming Dynasty)

MEASURING AND MAPPING
In the second half of the fifteenth century, the revised some computations, made new celestial this case, however, Ptolemy's authority was
works of Claudius Ptolemy of Alexandria observations, and even noted inconsistencies in soon challenged by the new knowledge derived
(c. A.D. -LOO - c. A.D. i/oj were of central impor- Ptolemy's system, but no one emerged to dis- from the voyages of exploration. By the second
tance to European astronomy and geography. pute his vision of the universe until Copernicus' half of the century, the Portuguese had traveled
His principal texts, the Almagest and the Geo- heliocentric theory was published in the six- farther south down the African coast than
graphia, were preserved in the Islamic world teenth century. Ptolemy's maps extended. With the first voy-
during the Middle Ages. The former, the Ptolemy's Geographia reached Florence in the ages to the Americas, the classical image of the
crowning achievement of the Greek tradition of early fifteenth century and was avidly studied world was revealed as incomplete. Early six-
mathematical astronomy, became known in as the principal text of classical cartography teenth-century cartographers had to struggle
Christian Europe when it was translated into and geography. It contained mathematical sys- to integrate this revolutionary data into
Latin in the later twelfth century. It presented tems for representing the curved surface of the their maps.
the complicated formulae that were needed to earth on maps, as well as tables of the cities of
describe the geocentric concept of the universe the classical world plotted by latitude and lon-
that prevailed in classical antiquity. Renais- gitude and maps (probably added in Byzantine
sance astronomers corrected the translation, times) that had been based upon the tables. In

Ill

THE MOVEMENT OF THE UNIVERSE
c. 1450-1500
Flemish, possibly Tournai
tapestry
3
415 x 800 (i6} /8 x 315]
references: Madrid 1892-1893, 79, no. 167; Las
joyas 1893, pis. 179-180; Toledo, Museo de Santa
Cruz 1958, 256, no. 669; Firenze 1980, 327, no.
LI ; Cortes Hernandez 1982, 27-28, 30 and 126-
127; Revuelta Tubino 1987, i: 55-56, no. 87, ills.
Museo de Santa Cruz, Toledo (on loan from
Toledo Cathedral)

At the center of this tapestry, which represents
the movement of the heavens, is the celestial
sphere as an astrolabe activated by an angel
who turns the rete with a crank. The rete
shows a stereographic projection of the celestial
sphere, with the extrazodiacal constellations of
the Northern sky. The polar star is at the
center: the inner and outer concentric circles
represent respectively the polar circle and the
tropic of Capricorn, the path of the sun being
shown on the ecliptic circle. The extrazodiacal
constellations (among them Andromeda, Pega-
sus, Orion, etc., with Draco round the polar
circle; some are shown on a flowery meadow)
are identified by inscriptions and depicted
according to the tradition transmitted in illus-
trations to Hyginus' Astronomica (cat. 115).
The image of the heavens is explained in a
Latin text: "Thus adorned with the fixed stars
the sky revolves under the pole both through
the region of the North Wind and the South
Wind; according to their different effects they
are fitted to different figures of people and
other signs and planets and the belt of the
zodiac keeps under itself [that is, controls]
their movement/' (Sub polo volvitur c[o]elum
sic ornatum I stellis fixis tarn per aquilonis

214 CIRCA 1492