Illustration of an Armillary Sphere

This illustration of an armillary sphere is from a treatise on astronomy, Sefer mareh ha-ofanim (The Appearance of the Heavenly Beings), by Solomon ben Abraham Avigdor. The treatise was mostly a translation of Johannes de Sacrobosco’s thirteenth-century Latin text De sphaera mundi (On the Sphere of the World), considered the standard textbook on astronomy until the mid-seventeenth century. This manuscript was written in Mantua, Italy.