Titelprent voor: Andreas Cellarius, Harmonica Macrocosmica seu Atlas Universalis et Novus, 1708 1660 - 1708

Curator: Looking at this piece, I’m struck by how ornate and crowded it is, yet it all somehow balances. What do you see at first glance? Editor: The light and dark play, that's what grabs me immediately. There’s a deep sense of symbolic division and hierarchy – like looking at two different worlds attempting communication. It's Baroque at its finest in its pursuit of capturing maximal sensory experience. Curator: Indeed. What we are looking at here is the title print for Andreas Cellarius’ “Harmonica Macrocosmica seu Atlas Universalis et Novus”, made somewhere between 1660 and 1708 and engraved by Frederick Hendrick van den Hove. This engraving would have prefaced an atlas, a kind of ‘greatest hits’ of celestial and terrestrial cartography at the time. Editor: An Atlas as a frontispiece – quite fitting. I notice the figures on the right – learned men, astronomers perhaps – reaching with a measuring rod towards putti who bear a book. It speaks to knowledge being literally passed on, almost as if it’s divine in origin. I find myself drawn to the presence of these geometric forms representing celestial knowledge and understanding – the bridge between the sacred and the empirical, very indicative of this period's shifting consciousness. Curator: Absolutely. There’s the terrestrial, scientific knowledge we gather, illustrated through earthly astronomers. And on the other side, those chubby cherubs afloat in cosmic ether, representing celestial or divine knowledge, pulling back. It shows the changing times, that balance is off. Editor: Yet that delicate measuring rod, the only connection in this divided composition, seems so tenuous. A whisper bridging eons. Is it optimistic or cautionary, this allegory? A yearning for a unity of knowledge, maybe lost, or on the verge of being found? Curator: I suppose it’s open to interpretation. The image seems caught in a moment of tension. It speaks of that pivotal shift, between the sacred understanding of the universe and the birth of empirical science and how uneasy and awkward the transaction sometimes could be. Editor: Yes, that tension makes this far more compelling than mere decoration. The title page becomes a doorway, doesn’t it? An invitation, but also a question. Fascinating.