A Study of the Constellation Pictures with Special Reference to Aratea Mss.

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The Phaenomena, written by the third century B.C. Greek poet Aratos of Soli, is an astronomical poem providing an expository description of the constellations. The work was so popular during the Roman period that it was translated into Latin many times. Those Latin versions are collectively known as 'Aratea', but their prototype is now lost. Looking at the many illustrated 'Aratea' manuscripts produced from the Carolingian period through to the Renaissance, this research project aims to reconstruct the picture cycles of the constellations in Aratos' Phaenomena and to examine the processes by which these illustrations originating in Greece were transmitted down to later times.In this year we have carried out systematic classification and arrangement of all the visual materials acquired in 2004-05 through libraries in Europe and the U.S. First, the constellatory illustrations were divided into two major groups : 'Aratea' MSS and 'Aratea' variants. The former group can be further classified into several subgroups according to text type (e.g. 'Caesar Germanicus' or 'Cicero') and recension type. As a result of this analysis it has become clear that the text tradition does not necessarily correspond with the pictorial tradition ; in other words, there are some cases in which a picture cycle originally made for a certain recension text has been recycled for another recension text. It has also been shown that while most of the picture cycles in 'Aratea' variants trace back to those in 'Aratea' MSS, they include some illustrations that seem to have been newly made for the corresponding texts.