- Farnese Atlas
The Farnese Atlas is a 2nd-century Roman marble copy of a
Hellenistic sculpture of Atlas kneeling with aglobe weighing heavily on his shoulders. It is the oldest extant statue of the Titan ofGreek mythology , who is represented in earlier vase-painting, and more importantly the oldest known representation of thecelestial sphere . The sculpture is at the National Archaeological Museum (Museo Archeologico Nazionale) [http://www.cib.na.cnr.it/remuna/mann/mann.html] inNaples, Italy . It stands seven feet (2.1 meters) tall, and the globe is 65 cm in diameter.The name "Farnese Atlas" reflects its acquisition by
Alessandro Cardinal Farnese in the early 16th century, and its subsequent exhibition in theVilla Farnese .Atlas labors under the weight because he had been sentenced by
Zeus to hold up the sky. The globe shows a depiction of the night sky as seen from outside the outermostcelestial sphere , with low reliefs depicting 41 (some sources say 42) of the 48 classical Greekconstellation s distinguished byPtolemy , including; Aries the ram, Cygnus the swan andHercules the hero. The Farnese Atlas is the oldest surviving pictorial record of Western constellations. It dates to Roman times, around AD150 , but has long been presumed to represent constellations mapped in earlier Greek work.In 2005, at a meeting of the
American Astronomical Society inSan Diego, California , Dr. Bradley E. Schaefer, a professor ofphysics atLouisiana State University , presented a widely reported analysis concluding that the text ofHipparchus ' long loststar catalog may have been the inspiration for the representation of the constellations on the globe, thereby reviving and expanding an earlier proposal by Georg Thiele (1898). The constellations are fairly detailed and Schaefer regards them as scientifically accurate given the period of the globe's creation, implying that it was modeled after a scholarly work. His statistical analysis concludes that the positions of these constellations are consistent with where they would have appeared in the time of Hipparchus (129 BC) - leading to the conclusion that the statue is based on the star catalog.However, because the globe contains no actual stars, and because the circles on the globe are drawn inexactly and ambiguously by a sculptor copying the Hellenistic model rather than by an astronomer, the dating of the globe is still uncertain and its source or sources remain controversial; Schaefer's conclusions have been strongly contested (e.g., Dennis Duke, "Journal for the History of Astronomy", February, 2006) most particularly on the ground that regardless of the globe's date the constellations on it show large disagreements with the only existing work by Hipparchus.
External links
* [http://www.phys.lsu.edu/farnese/JHAFarneseProofs.htm Bradley E. Schaefer, "The epoch of the constellations on the Farnese Hercules and their origins in Hipparchus's lost catalogue"]
* [http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/18/science/space/18star.html?ex=1107010217&ei=1&en=7742a85eeac43e92 N.Y. Times article on Dr. Schaefer's presentation]
* [http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/hipparchus_catalogue_050124.html Space.com article on the Hipparchus' star catalogue found.]
* [http://www.cib.na.cnr.it/remuna/mann/mann.html National Archaeological Museum, Naples, Italy]
* [http://www.csit.fsu.edu/~dduke/farnese Critiques of Schaefer's hypothesis]
* [http://www.dioi.org/ggg.htm Critical review of Schaefer's arithmetic, quotations, statistics, photogrammetry, grasp of Hipparchus's data, and responsiveness]
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