Taurus the Bull

Radcliffe Observatory Tower of the Winds

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Isisbridge ^club

Tower of the Winds, Radcliffe Observatory, Oxford:

Below the level of the balcony are the Signs of the Zodiac modelled for the Coade factory by J C F Rossi, who took his designs from the Farnese Globe, a celestial globe (now in the Museo Nationale, Naples) which has survived from Roman times and is thought to be a Roman copy of a Greek original. A map of an 'Ancient Globe of the Heavens' taken from the Farnese Globe had been published in Spence's Polymetis in 1747, and it was this map that Rossi used as a model for the Observatory's Zodiac signs. The number of Zodiac panels is not twelve but eleven – the signs for Scorpio (the scorpion) and Libra (the scales) are combined both on the Farnese Globe and on the Observatory.

www.gtc.ox.ac.uk/about/history/radcliffe-observatory

It has long been recognised that the names given by both Greeks and Romans to the signs of the zodiac derive from Greek mythology. For example, Aries is the ram whose golden fleece was recovered by Jason, Taurus the bull whose form Zeus assumed when he abducted Europa, and Leo the lion slain by Herakles (Hercules) as the first of his twelve labours.

The curious form of Capricornus, the goat with a fish-tail, derives from the myth in which the god Pan jumped into the water just as he was changing shape in an attempt to escape from the monster Typhon. While the half of him above the water assumed the shape of a goat, the lower half became a fish.

15 months ago. Edited 15 months ago.

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