Cosmigraphics: Picturing Space Through Time in 4,000 Years of Mapping the Universe

Paintings of Saturn by German astronomer-artist Maria Clara Eimmart, a pioneering woman in science, from 1693–1698.

Eimmart's depictions are based on a 1659 engraving by Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens, the first to confirm that Saturn’s mysterious appendages, which had confounded astronomers since Galileo Galilei, were in fact 'a thin flat ring, nowhere touching.'

What makes Eimmart's painting unique is that it combines the observations of more than ten astronomers into a depiction of superior accuracy.

Credit: Dipartimento di Fisica e Astronomia, Universita di Bologna

Long before Galileo pioneered the telescope, antagonising the church and unleashing a “hummingbird effect” of innovation, humanity had been busy cataloguing the heavens through millennia of imaginative speculative maps of the cosmos.

We have always sought to make visible the invisible forces we long to understand, the mercy and miracle of existence, and nothing beckons to us with more intense allure than the majesty and mystery of the universe.

Four millennia of that mesmerism-made-visible is what journalist, photographer, and astro-visualisation scholar Michael Benson explores with great dedication and discernment in Cosmigraphics: Picturing Space Through Time, a pictorial catalogue of our quest to order the cosmos and grasp our place in it, a sensemaking process defined by what Benson aptly calls our “gradually dawning, forever incomplete situational awareness.”

From glorious paintings of the creation myth predating William Blake’s work by centuries to the pioneering galaxy drawing that inspired Van Gogh’s Starry Night to NASA’s maps of the Apollo 11 landing site, the images remind us that the cosmos, like Whitman, like ourselves, is vast and contains multitudes.

This masterwork of scholarship also attests, ever so gently, ever so powerfully, to the value of the “ungoogleable,” a considerable portion of Benson’s bewitching images comes from the vaults of the world’s great science libraries and archives, bringing to light a wealth of previously unseen treasures.

Beginning in 1870, French-born artist and astronomer Étienne Trouvelot spent a decade producing a series of spectacular illustrations of celestial bodies and cosmic phenomena. 

In 1872, he joined the Harvard College Observatory and began using its powerful telescopes in perfecting his drawings. 

His pastel illustrations, including this chromolithograph of Mare Humorum, a vast impact basin on the southwest side of the Earth-facing hemisphere of the moon, were among the first serious attempts to enlist art in making popular the results of observations using technology developed for scientific research.

Courtesy of the U. of Michigan Library

Étienne Trouvelot's 1873 engravings of solar phenomena, produced during his first year at the Harvard College Observatory for the institution's journal. 

The legend at the bottom reveals that the distance between the two prominences in the lower part of the engraving is one hundred thousand miles, more than 12 times the diameter of Earth. 

Despite the journal's modest circulation, such engravings were soon co-opted by more mainstream publications and became trailblazing tools of science communication that greatly influenced public understanding of the universe's scale.

Courtesy of the Wolbach Library, Harvard