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Cancer the crab

zodiac signs at the Radcliffe Observatory
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Isisbridge said:

Tower of the Winds, Radcliffe Observatory, Oxford:

Below the level of the balcony are the Signs of the Zodiac modelled for the Coade factory by J C F Rossi, who took his designs from the Farnese Globe, a celestial globe (now in the Museo Nationale, Naples) which has survived from Roman times and is thought to be a Roman copy of a Greek original. A map of an 'Ancient Globe of the Heavens' taken from the Farnese Globe had been published in Spence's Polymetis in 1747, and it was this map that Rossi used as a model for the Observatory's Zodiac signs. The number of Zodiac panels is not twelve but eleven – the signs for Scorpio (the scorpion) and Libra (the scales) are combined both on the Farnese Globe and on the Observatory.

www.gtc.ox.ac.uk/about/history/radcliffe-observatory
11 years ago