Farnese Atlas

The Farnese Atlas is a sculpture of the Greek god Atlas kneeling with a globe weighing heavily on his shoulders. It is the oldest extant statue of the Greek deity. The statue is at the National Archaeological Museum ( Il 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 came about due to the acquisition by Cardinal Alessandro Farnese in the early 16th-century, and its subsequent exhibition in the Villa Farnese in Rome.

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 Earth, with pictures of 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 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, reported that the text of Hipparchus' long lost star catalog may have been the inspiration for the representation of the constellations on the globe. 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.

External Links

• N.Y. Times article on Dr. Schaefer's presentation
• Space.com article on the Hipparchus' star catalogue found.
• National Archaeological Museum, Naples, Italy