The Celestial Figures
The Twelve Celestial Houses
The sky drawn as a house with twelve doors.
- Work
- from an engraved nativity of Alexander the Great
- Maker
- Engraver unknown
- Date
- c. 17th century
- Source
- Wellcome Collection, London
Wellcome Collection. Public Domain / CC BY 4.0
Format
The full-resolution scan, color-managed to the source plate — yours to print, study, and explore.
Size
$29.00
The story
An engraved oval, its rim divided into the twelve celestial houses — the fixed compartments of the sky through which the signs and planets were seen to pass — each cusp ruled off and marked with its glyph and degree, a portrait medallion at the centre. The figure is a nativity cast, long after the fact, for Alexander the Great: the kind of retrospective horoscope early-modern astrologers liked to draw for the famous dead. It is a schematic of a complete symbolic architecture — twelve rooms for the whole of a life, hung above the horizon. We frame it as design and as history: the sky drawn as a house with twelve doors.
See it on your wall
The plate, in your home
The Twelve Celestial Houses 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 plate — from an engraved nativity of Alexander the Great (1650), held by Wellcome Collection, London. The work was published before 1931 and is centuries out of copyright.
- Printed to order on 200gsm EMA matte art paper; framed pieces sit behind acrylic, no mat.
- 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 plates cost more than a poster: we print from the highest-resolution scans available, at sizes where the engraving itself becomes visible — the emblem line, the letterpress bite, the registration of colour — on stock made to outlive its owner.
Attribution: Wellcome Collection. Public Domain / CC BY 4.0
