Farnese Atlas

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The Farnese Atlas is a 2nd-century Roman marble copy of a Hellenistic sculpture of Atlas kneeling with a globe weighing heavily on his shoulders. It is the oldest extant statue of the Titan of Greek mythology, who is represented in earlier vase-painting, and more importantly the oldest known representation of the celestial sphere. The sculpture is at the National Archaeological Museum (Museo Archeologico Nazionale [1]) in Naples, 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 the Villa 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 outermost celestial sphere, with low reliefs depicting 41 (some sources say 42) of the 48 classical Greek constellations including; Aries the ram, Cygnus the swan and Hercules the hero. The Farnese Atlas is the oldest surviving pictorial record of Western constellations. It dates to Roman times, around A.D. 150, but represents constellations mapped in an earlier Greek work (129 BC).

In 2005, at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in San Diego, California, Dr. Bradley E. Schaefer, a professor of physics at Louisiana State University, presented a widely reported analysis concluding that the text of Hipparchus' long lost star catalog may have been the inspiration for the representation of the constellations on the globe, thereby reviving an earlier proposal by Georg Thiele. The constellations are fairly detailed and scientifically accurate given the period of its creation, implying that the globe was modeled after a scholarly work. The position of these constellations is consistent with where they would have appeared in the time of Hipparchus - leading to the conclusion that the statue is based on the star catalog.

However, because the globe contains no actual stars, and because the lines on the globe are drawn inexactly, the dating of the globe is still uncertain and its source or sources remain controversial, and Schaefer's conclusions have been strongly contested.