Holding the Sky: An Image Before It Was a Punishment

The figure of Atlas bearing the heavens is one of the oldest visual images to survive from Greek myth into everyday language, but its meaning has shifted. In Hesiod he stands at the western edge of the world holding the sky apart from the earth by necessity, a cosmological role as much as a penalty, keeping the two from collapsing back together.

Greek and Roman art most often show him kneeling under a celestial globe marked with constellations rather than the flat vault, and it is this astronomical Atlas, the Farnese Atlas in Naples, a Roman copy of a Hellenistic original, carries the oldest surviving depiction of the Greek constellations on its globe, that carried his name forward. The bound volume of maps took the name atlas only in the sixteenth century, from Mercator, who attached it to a mythical philosopher-king of Mauretania rather than to the Titan directly, so that the modern sense braids two Atlases together.