The Planets and their Children by Hendrick Goltzius (c. 1596).Goltzius ranked his “Planets” from the furthest from Earth to the nearest, at least according to the knowledge of his days and he attached each one of them to a specific realm: - Saturn : agriculture - Jupiter : the liberal arts - Mars : the arts of war - the Sun : Apollo : the arts of government - Venus : the realm of love - Mercury : the arts - the Moon : Diana : fishing and navigation. Following the astronomical tradition of the time, such works contained depictions of each planet in anthropomorphic form together with an illustration of the pasttimes, professions, and conditions of its children. For each planet, the images were matched with texts which reviewed what we would call astronomical information about the planet (position, period, speed, etc.) and astrological information on its children.
Posted on: Sun, 27 Jul 2014 07:36:37 +0000