The Missing Telescope in Vermeer’s The Astronomer

Abstract

In The Astronomer (1668) Johannes Vermeer presents us with an interior scene of a man seated at a small table in front of a window, his right hand reaching out and touching a celestial globe on which a series of constellations are rendered (fig. 1). This globe is one of a pair produced by Jodocus Hondius in 1600; the terrestrial globe from this set can be seen in this painting’s companion work, The Geographer (1668). Astronomy and geography were two branches of the same field at this time. The