This article is taken from the monthly Sciences et Avenir n°934, dated December 2024.
“That the beauty of the sky lends itself to elevation, to admiration, even to dreams, who would deny it?writes Pascal Dethurens, the author of the beautiful book Stars. What art owes to the cosmosspecialist in comparative literature at the University of Strasbourg. And in fact, the cosmos has been a source of inspiration for many scholars and artists from Antiquity to the present day.
Between 170 and 120 BCE, the Greek astronomer Hipparchus produced the first known catalog of stars, associating them with numerical coordinates. During the Renaissance, the constellations were shown on fabulous celestial globes such as the imposing Coronelli globe, with its 4 meters in diameter and a weight of 2 tonnes!
Deified in Antiquity, the Sun is gradually associated with temporal power
The course of the work is then divided by type of star: the Sun, the Moon, the planets and celestial events, such as comets or eclipses, inspire Greco-Roman statues, bas-reliefs, paintings and other monumental frescoes… Deified in Antiquity, the Sun is gradually associated with temporal power, until it embodied in the 17th century Louis XIV, the “Sun King”.
After the scientific discoveries of Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler during the Renaissance, the day star retained its central place as a regulator of nature, a place already illustrated by the illuminations of the calendar of the Very Rich Hours of the Duke of Berry in the 15th century. Romanticism makes it an aesthetic figure, often reducing it to the sole glow of melancholic sunsets, when the industrial age will celebrate the rising star, like Claude Monet with Rising sun print.
A richly illustrated work
A richly illustrated work, also punctuated with infographic pages which provide scientific insight.
Credit: Flammarion
“Stars. What art owes to the cosmos“, Pascal Dethurens, Flammarion, 288 p., €49.90
