Spaera Armilaris/ Imnstrumentum artificiale Orrery ab inventore appellatum

Title

Spaera Armilaris/ Imnstrumentum artificiale Orrery ab inventore appellatum

Description

Magnificent representation of astronimic devices.

c. 1774

Artist

Lotter (1717-1777)

Tobias Conrad Lotter ( 1717- 1777) was a carthographer and publisher in Augsburg. He married the elder daughter of Matthäus Seutters and worked in the company of his father in la was map maker. He produced under the „ eye“ of M. Seutter his first „ Asia minor“ atlas between 1740 and 1744. The Asia minor altas of Lotter, Praecipua orbis terrarum imperia, regna et provincias, Germania potissimum tabelli 80 exactae delineatis sistens usui militiae ducum ac peregrinantium maxime accommodatus opera contains 63 maps, mosly Lotters work and other maps from Seutter where he put his name in the lower margin.

Historical Description

The history of western astrology can be traced back to pre-Christian times in Babylonia or Mesopotamia and Egypt. Its basic principles of interpretation and calculation, which are still recognizable today, were learned by astrology in the Hellenistic Greek-Egyptian city of Alexandria. Astronomy emerged from it as meaningless observation and mathematical recording of the starry sky, and it remained associated with it for a long time as an auxiliary science. Astrology had an eventful history in Europe. After the elevation of Christianity to the state religion in the Roman Empire, it was partly fought, partly adapted to Christianity and temporarily pushed aside. In the course of the early Middle Ages, astrology, especially the learned astronomy-astrology, revived in the Byzantine Empire from around the late 8th century, as also somewhat later in the Muslim Al-Andalus on the Iberian Peninsula. From the later High Middle Ages and especially in the Renaissance to the 17th century, it was widely regarded as a science in Europe, always combined with astronomy in the quadrivium of the seven liberal arts that had been taught at universities. In the course of the Enlightenment, however, it lost its plausibility in educated circles.