Two winters ago, in a dimly lit archive in Leiden, I unrolled a folio that had not been opened in perhaps a century. The paper — heavy, rag-based, the colour of old cream — bore a night sky rendered with such obsessive precision that the gold-leaf stars seemed to emit their own light. I had come to study its geometry; I stayed for its beauty.
Gold Against the Void
The engraver's decision to render every star in burnished gilt against a deep lapis ground was not mere decoration. Ultramarine, ground from Afghan lapis lazuli, cost more than gold by weight in the seventeenth century. To paint the entire sky field in this pigment was an act of extravagance that declared the heavens worthy of the finest materials on Earth.
The atlas does not depict the sky as it appears — it reveals the sky as it was understood: a vast, ordered machine, beautiful in its regularity. — From the Preface, Harmonia Macrocosmica