ABSTRACT
At the conjunction of two major traditions in the history of art and the history of science lies a curious manuscript illustration produced in the Carolingian era, a single page in the Leiden manuscript Vossianus Q.79. In the history of the Calendar of 354 (the Calendar of Filocalus), of which no early exemplar survives, this ninth-century illumination has been used to provide certain links and clues to the appearance of the symbols of the months in that late Roman example of pagan imagery. In the more complex history of Aratus's Phaenomena, the same picture, which exists as an appendage to a manuscript of the Aratea, has been used to establish the appearances of certain planetary and zodiacal figures which do not survive in earlier Aratean manuscripts. Finally, in the controversial history of the early evidences for ideas of sun-centered planetary motion, the Leiden illustration has recently surfaced as a witness to the survival of ancient speculations that the planets Mercury and Venus circle the sun rather than the earth.
