Globe of the sky

It is the oldest item in the collection of the Wincenty Pola Manor House anda valuable exception in the collection of over one hundred and twenty Polish-language globes of the Earth. Dating from 1790, the object is a contemporary of the manor house from Firlejowszczyzna that today houses the poet-geographer's museum. The globe was made in the workshop of Johann Georg Klinger in Nuremberg. Its publisher was born in this city in 1764 and died in 1806. He was an art dealer and engraver. Together with his partners he ran an antique shop which was later transformed into a publishing house supplying globes with descriptions in various languages to the market. At that time, they were often offered in pairs (a globe of the sky and a globe of the Earth), and even in triplets – the third component was an armillary sphere. Sixty years later (in 1850), the same company produced the first Polish-language globe of Earth that we know today.

It is not known when and how the object found its way to the National Museum in Lublin. It probably happened before the Second World War. Its condition was deplorable. In the years 2010-2012, it underwent conservation and restoration carried out by Katarzyna Rafalska, then a student at the Faculty of Fine Arts of (nomen omen) Mikołaj Kopernik University in Toruń (it was her graduation thesis). As a result, the globe regained its former content and form. It looks like new, although white spots remain on it in places where paper has been lost.

The constellations illustrated on its map were presented in a way typical for the sky globes of those times – seen from the outside, as if from the Creator's point of view (i.e., in a mirror reflection of what we see from Earth). The constellations are signed in Latin.

The globe illustrates the astronomical knowledge of the time and is a contribution to the history of naming the constellations.