Starlight expression

Phænomena: Doppelmayr’s Celestial Atlas

Giles Sparrow, London: Thames & Hudson, 2022, 255pp., £50

Johann Doppelmayr (1677-1750) spent most of his life in Nuremberg, but had a European reputation for his writings on astronomy and mathematics. Nuremberg had long been an intellectual and technical as well as political powerhouse, and as a young man Doppelmayr had travelled in Germany, Holland and England, meeting astronomers, mathematicians, natural philosophers, and physicists. He was a member of the Berlin Academy, the Royal Society, and the Imperial Russian Academy of Sciences. He was a globemaker and active experimentalist, and a professor of mathematics, some of whose students became mathematicians and makers of scientific instruments in their own rights.

He published several books still useful to historians of science, but it is his Atlas Cœlestis of 1742 for which he is chiefly remembered. The Atlas was one of the great scientific achievements of the Enlightenment, sumptuously illustrated with star charts, tracks of comets, descriptions of eclipses, selenographic maps, projections of how the solar system would look from other planets, and diagrams illustrating the theories of Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Kepler, Mercator, Newton, Halley and Riccioli, to mention just some. Phæonema is an appreciation of the Atlas, which is truly, as Giles Sparrow enthuses, “a marvellous synthesis of art and science.”

In 1742, astronomy was not the icily abstract discipline of today, but still had one foot in ancient cosmologies, classical allegory, Biblical literalism, medieval astrology and Renaissance Hermeticism. Zodiacal figures cavort among careful calculations and cherubim carry quadrants in the pages of the Atlas, in a universe where heliocentricity was still not fully settled. Doppelmayr summarised the latest thinking of his day, and in so doing helped clarify it. The Atlas is still relevant today; Phænomena has a Preface by the current Astronomer Royal.

The book is handsomely produced, with marbled endpapers and no fewer than 736 illustrations. There are reproductions of all 30 of Doppelmayr’s main plates, to which Sparrow has added other Atlas images, and explanations that give the context of the Atlas’s appearance, and compare today’s knowledge with the theories of the time. Plate 14, for example, “Theoria Satellitum Iovis et Saturni,” measures 1742’s ideas about the moons of Jupiter and Saturn against what we know now – with magnified details of Plate 14, and complementary illustrations drawn from elsewhere in the Atlas and the notebooks of Galileo and Huygens. Throughout, we find illustrations from medieval miniaturists, Cassini, Dürer, Eimmart, Hevelius, Hooke, Kircher and others, along with Doppelmayr’s own mesmeric mathematical drawings. Every page transports readers to an excitingly ever-expanding world of enquiry.

In a world increasingly ungrateful of the Western legacy, and even starting to reject science, this is a splendid tribute to an influential artisan of astronomy, and earthbound polymaths who were blessed with soaring imaginations.

This review first appeared in Chronicles, and is reproduced with permission

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