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Outer Space: Myths, Name Meanings, Calendars. From the Emergence of History to the Present Day
Griffith Observatory, a high-profile hillside landmark overlooking the entire Los Angeles basin, is one of those points of contact between earth and sky where astronomy is dramatized in a planetarium theater. Entering the monumental front doors, a visitor first encounters a Foucault pendulum. Its 240-pound brass ball swings at the end of a 40-foot wire in a sunken enclosure below the rotunda ceiling. The pendulum’s motion demonstrates the earth’s rotation in a subplot of the epic of Newtonian physics. Overhead, however, the ceiling mural documents a more archaic approach to the cosmos. Primary elements of the sky are figuratively portrayed as the mythological characters the ancient Greeks and Romans recognized in the operations of heaven. Four of the planets known to antiquity — Saturn, Jupiter, Mercury, and Venus — appear as gods. Other Olympian children devoured by their father Saturn stand at his feet. The Pleiades are six winged women accompanied by Orion. The east and west winds, the four seasons, and a comet falling toward the North Star are all personified. Io, a mortal paramour of Zeus who was transformed into a heifer, and her guardian, many-eyed Argos, are conscripted to serve as symbols of the moon and the starry sky. Atlas, the world-axis Titan who supported the heavens, straddles the Big Dipper and holds up a ring of zodiac figures at the top of vault. Urania, the Muse of astronomy, grips the Star of Bethlehem, in a nod to another tradition of celestial myth.
Giotto's frescos in the Salone of the Palazzo della Ragione, Padua, were painted across three registers. The upper register contains celestial astronomical imagery that few scholars have been able fully to understand. Using two sections of this upper register as case studies, I reconstructed the skies over Padua in the medieval period using astronomical and astrological software, together with the knowledge of poetic astronomy and naked eye astronomy. This approach showed that, rather than being simple decorations, these images are instead reflective of the constellations that dictated the seasons and the cycle of the year as seen over Padua c. 1309. Furthermore, they reveal a night sky that was populated with a constellational iconography that, I argue, was part of an ensouled cosmology.
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