Coronelli's Celestial Globe Gores

Vincenzo Coronelli was the greatest globe-maker of the Baroque, cosmographer to the Republic of Venice, who built celestial globes as tall as a man. To cover them he engraved gores — long tapering sheets of stars, shaped to be pasted onto a sphere — and printed flat, they become strange and beautiful things: Hercules striding and Ophiuchus wrestling his serpent, stretched into the curving geometry of a globe unrolled. Almost nothing else in the catalog looks like them. They are the working craft behind the heavens made solid, the pattern from which whole worlds were once assembled.

Maker

Vincenzo Coronelli

Date

c. 1693

Medium of the original

Plate

Original held by

Engraved Venice · Wikimedia Commons

Credit

Engraved Venice · Wikimedia Commons

Rights

Public domain, verified

Catalogue number

PA-00988