What do astronomy and jewelry have in common? In the late Renaissance, looking up at the stars – the huge
In the famous first stanza of his 17th-century poem “Omen of Innocence,” William Blake wrote:
See the world in a grain of sand
And a paradise among wild flowers,
Hold infinity in your hands
An eternity in one hour.
Perhaps Blake didn’t want us to literally hold infinity in our hands, but he may have realized that there was, in a sense, a way to cover the entire known universe.
Combining the elegance of gold jewelry with the meticulous craftsmanship of complex timepieces, a unique style of ring was born from the cosmic fashions of the 16th and 17th centuries. Known as armillary sphere rings, these deceptively simple gold creations can be worn on the finger like any other band, but when removed they open up into a sphere consisting of several interconnected circular bands, operated by delicate hinges.
Examples of armillary spheres in the collections of the British Museum and the Swedish National History Museum date back to Germany and were made when astronomical research reached new heights in the late Renaissance. In 1543, Copernicus essentially launched the Scientific Revolution when he claimed that the Earth revolved around the sun, not the other way around.
A few years later, the Italian polymath Galileo Galilei, known as the pioneer of observational astronomy, built a powerful telescope that allowed him to observe the stars of the Milky Way for the first time, see Jupiter’s four largest moons, and identify the rings of Saturn, among other discoveries.
The historic gold ring is based on an ancient astronomical instrument called an armillary sphere, which stems from the long-proven theory that everything in the universe revolves around the Earth. These designs, used since at least the 2nd century, place our planet at the center. A group that rotates around an axis and provides a reference point for locating other celestial bodies. Individual rings are associated with the equator, the Tropic of Cancer and the constellation Capricornus, as well as the revolutions of the Sun – this ring also represents the twelve signs of the zodiac.
