The Civ 5 C&C Off-Topic Thread

[retrocity5]

The circle obviously must be astronomical, and the man in the chair and blue appear to be royalty. The reds must be religious figures and the green might be musicians, writers, and/or artists. The wings suggest they are have died. The heads though. Perhaps they represent the seasons. Quite interesting. The Voynich Manuscript has to be one of my favorite mysterious texts from the medieval ages.

 

[Arakhor]

Oh, yes. The assembled people around the throne could be the artist's take on the orders of society: those that pray, those that rule and those that work. I hadn't considered that angle when I posted my analysis in a different thread.

... the entire known cosmology of the Middle Ages is displayed... along with the Four Winds and God enthroned amongst all his angels. Along the left side the nine angelic choirs are listed, with each of the spheres of creation named in the middle of the image.

For those of you who haven't spent a while studying the image, the order of the spheres starts in the centre with earth, water, fire and air, according to the Aristotelian view, followed by the known 'planets' in the order described by Dante in his Divine Comedy (the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn), followed by the fixed stars (the realm of the Zodiac and the observable heavens), then what is presumably the Crystalline Heaven, the Primum Mobile (that which sets the spheres in their movements) and the Empyrean itself, the incorporeal Divine realm.

What's also interesting to note is that the Crystalline Heaven doesn't appear in Paradiso, as Dante ties the other nine celestial spheres into the Seven Virtues and the nine angelic choirs, leaving the Empyrean as the tenth transcendental sphere, not the eleventh as depicted in the Nuremberg Chronicle. Not depicted, of course, are Uranus, Neptune or any trans-Neptunian object, such as Pluto or Eris.