The Constellations
Piccolomini, Alexander (1508-1578)
De la sfera del mundo [& ...] de le stelle fisse
Venetia: Al segno del Pozzo, 1540.
In 1540, humanist Alessandro Piccolomini published the first printed
star atlas, De le stelle fisse. His earlier book De la sfera del mundo explained the movements of the stars and eclipses in Italian instead of Latin. Writing in the vernacular helped to spread astronomical knowledge beyond the university sphere. As seen in the copy displayed, these two works were often bound together into one volume.
In the two woodcuts displayed, the size of the printed star reflects its brightness in the sky. The system of correlating the visibility of stars with their printed size on a 1-4 scale set the precedent for later atlases. This practice slowly replaced the previous standard of illustrating constellations in a pictorial format, like the woodcuts seen above on Item 4 [see The Animals], and made the stars easier to identify in the sky.