The Celestial Figures
The Figure of a Nativity
A whole discipline built to complete one ruled square.
- Work
- from a book of astrology
- Maker
- Engraver unknown
- Date
- c. 1647
- 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
A square divided into twelve triangular houses, planets and signs entered around a central box — the standard figure of a nativity, or birth-chart, as astrologers cast it for centuries. This is the diagram itself, the geometry a practitioner filled in from tables of planetary positions for the moment of a birth. Drawn in the seventeenth century, it belongs to the age of William Lilly, when the casting of such figures was a learned craft with its own textbooks. Shown here as an artefact of method: a piece of applied geometry, elegant in its economy, that a whole discipline was built to complete — the sky reduced to a ruled square.
See it on your wall
The plate, in your home
The Figure of a Nativity 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 a book of astrology (1647), 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
