The Systems of the World
The Weighing of the World Systems
Urania holds the scales as two cosmologies are weighed.
- Chart
- Almagestum Novum
- Plate
- Almagestum Novum, frontispiece
- Astronomer
- Giovanni Battista Riccioli
- Date
- 1651
- Held by
- Published Bologna · The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Finish
Format
The full-resolution scan, color-managed to the source — yours to print, study, and explore.
Size
$29.00
The story
No image captures a science choosing its future like this one. Urania, muse of astronomy, holds a great balance: in one pan the Sun-centred system of Copernicus, in the other Riccioli's own preferred hybrid, the Tychonic — and it is Tycho's that hangs the heavier. Below reclines Ptolemy, his ancient Earth-centred cosmos gently set aside; above, the hand of God scatters the stars by "number, measure, and weight." It is the most famous frontispiece in the history of cosmology: the whole seventeenth-century argument over the shape of the universe, staged as a single breathtaking allegory.
See it on your wall
A window onto the heavens, in your home
The Weighing of the World Systems printed large and framed, hung in rooms like yours. Every edition ships ready to become the piece the room is built around.
About this reproduction
- A faithful reproduction of a public-domain chart held by Published Bologna · The Metropolitan Museum of Art — the work is centuries out of copyright.
- Printed to order on EMA matte art paper, 200gsm. Framed pieces sit in a box frame under acrylic, with no mount (gold-ink editions on specialist press).
- Color-managed to the source scan; we correct nothing and invent nothing.
- Ships in 5–10 business days, rolled in a heavy-wall tube (framed pieces ship flat-packed).
- If it arrives less than perfect, we reprint or refund — your choice.
Why our charts cost more than a poster: we print from the highest-resolution scans in existence, at sizes where the engraving itself becomes visible — the gold figures, the tiny stars, the cartouches — on a matte sheet that shows every line without glare.
From the same collection
