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Exploring the Relevance of the Star-positions in the Medieval Illuminated Manuscripts of Hyginus’ De Astronomia

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Abstract

This paper analyzes the agreement between pictures and text in the 20 extant manuscripts of Hyginus’ Astronomy which are illuminated and marked with stars, the majority of which date from the second half of the 15th century. It focuses on the number and position of the stars on the constellation’s figures, and systematically inventories in each manuscript all discrepancies between picture and text. The existence of independent constellation’s albums and the disconnection of pictor’s and scriptor’s activities could suggest a great mismatch of the two parts of illuminated manuscripts. The results of the investigation on these manuscripts are in fact more ambiguous. It actually appears that in some cases star’s positions precisely match the readings of a manuscript and lead to the conclusion that star-positioning should have sometimes been a secondary process adjusted to the very text of the illustrated manuscript.


Open access | Peer reviewed

Presentato: 13 Gennaio 2017 | Accettato: 31 Marzo 2017 | Pubblicato 01 Settembre 2017 | Lingua: en

Keywords Medieval astronomy • Astrothesy • Star iconography • Ancient astronomy • Ancient constellations • Illuminated manuscripts • Hyginus

Copyright © 2017 Arnaud Zucker. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

Permalink http://doi.org/10.14277/6969-165-2/ANT-13-9


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