Poeticon astronomicon is a star atlas whose text is attributed to "
HyginusHyginus can refer to:*Pope Hyginus, also a saint, Bishop of Rome about 140*Gaius Julius Hyginus , Roman poet, author of Fabulae, reputed author of Poeticon astronomicon*Hyginus Gromaticus, Roman surveyor...
", though the true authorship is disputed. During the
RenaissanceThe Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Florence in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe...
, the work was attributed to the
RomanRome is the capital of Italy and the country's largest and most populated municipality , with over 2.7 million residents in , while the population of the urban area is estimated by Eurostat to be 3.46 million. The metropolitan area of Rome is estimated by OECD to have a population of 3.7 million...
historian
Gaius Julius HyginusGaius Julius Hyginus was a Latin author, a pupil of the famous Cornelius Alexander Polyhistor, and a freedman of Caesar Augustus. He was by Augustus elected superintendent of the Palatine library according to Suetonius' De Grammaticis, 20...
who lived during the first century B.C. However, the fact that the book lists the
constellationIn modern astronomy, a constellation is an area of the celestial sphere, defined by exact boundaries.The term "constellation" can also be used loosely to refer to just the more prominent visible stars that seem to form a pattern in that area.-Definitions:...
s in the same order as
PtolemyClaudius Ptolemaeus , known in English as Ptolemy , was a Roman citizen of Greek ancestry. He was a mathematician, astronomer, geographer, astrologer and a poet of a single epigram in the Greek Anthology. He lived in Egypt under the Roman Empire, and is believed to have been born in the town of...
's
AlmagestAlmagest is the Latin form of the Arabic name of a mathematical and astronomical treatise proposing the complex motions of the stars and planetary paths, originally written in Greek as by Ptolemy of Alexandria, Egypt, written in the 2nd century...
(written in the second century A.D.) has led many to believe that a more recent Hyginus created the text.
The text describes 47 of the 48 Ptolemaic constellations, centering primarily on the Greco-Roman mythology surrounding the constellations, though there is some discussion of the relative positions of stars. The first known printing was in 1475, attributed to "Ferrara."
The
Poeticon astronomicon was not formally published until 1482, by
Erhard RatdoltErhard Ratdolt was an early German printer. From Augsburg, he was active printing in Venice, where he worked from 1476 to 1486.There he produced a Kalendario for Regiomontanus, and editions of the Historia Romana of Appianus , and Euclid's Elements , solving the problem of reproducing...
in
VeniceVenice is a city in northern Italy, the capital of the region Veneto, a population of 271,367 . Together with Padua, the city is included in the Padua-Venice Metropolitan Area . The city historically was an independent nation...
,
ItalyItaly , officially the Italian Republic , is a country located on the Italian Peninsula in Southern Europe and on the two largest islands in the Mediterranean Sea, Sicily and Sardinia. Italy shares its northern, Alpine boundary with France, Switzerland, Austria and Slovenia...
. This edition carried the full title
Clarissimi uiri Hyginii Poeticon astronomicon opus utilissimum. Ratdolt commissioned a series of woodcuts depicting the constellations to accompany Hyginus' text. As with many other star atlases that would follow it, the positions of various stars are indicated overlaid on the image of each constellation. However, the relative positions of the stars in the woodcuts bear little resemblance to the descriptions given by Hyginus in the text or the actual positions of the stars in the sky.
As a result of the inaccuracy of the depicted star positions and the fact that the constellations are not shown with any context, the
Poeticon astronomicon is not particularly useful as a guide to the night sky. However, the illustrations commissioned by Ratdolt served as a template for future sky atlas renderings of the constellation figures. The text, by contrast, is an important source, and occasionally the only source, for some of the more obscure Greek myths.
External links