Reading the Sky

This exhibition tells the story of astronomy and astrology in the Mediterranean. Why did Mediterranean societies seek to read the sky so early on?

Enguerrand Lascols: There are many “sky cultures” in the history of mankind, but for this exhibition we’ve concentrated on the societies of the Mediterranean basin. The earliest known texts describing the starry sky date from Mesopotamia in the 3rd millennium BC, naming the stars and creating the first constellations. The ancient Greek world then took up and enriched this knowledge. In the Middle Ages, scholars from the Arab-Muslim world translated these ancient texts and developed new knowledge to better understand the cosmos, the stars that inhabit it, and their movements and cycles.

Juliette Bessette: Observing these regular cycles had a practical function. It enabled us to organize our daily lives, for example by watching for the appearance of a star on the horizon to mark the start of summer, favourable for certain types of agricultural crops. The stars were also invaluable guides on the high seas, with no other landmarks. But the sky was also a vast terrain for poetry, spirituality and the imagination!

Our knowledge of the sky and stars seems to be the fruit of a continuous dialogue, since Antiquity, between scientific knowledge and popular culture…

J.B. What really interested us was this interweaving. Until the Galilean revolution in the 17th century, astrology and astronomy worked together. The study of the stars and their movements served to forge scientific knowledge, but this knowledge was also used to establish influences on human affairs, sometimes omens concerning an entire society. Nostradamus, active near Marseille, in Salon-de-Provence, relied on the astronomical knowledge of his time to make calculations and formulate his prophecies.

E.L. More generally, popular imagination and wisdom are partly based on this knowledge, but they also create their own specific approaches to the sky. In fact, this dialogue enables us to highlight some very important parts of the Mucem collection, inherited from the Musée National des Arts et Traditions Populaires. The objects and stories on display bear witness to the fascination with the starry sky that can be seen in the decor of the objects, the tales that were passed down orally, and so on.

The exhibition features exceptional treasures spanning 3,000 years of history: what do you consider to be the highlights of this journey?

E.L. We are delighted to welcome some very fine loans from national and regional museums, as well as from Greece and Italy. Masterpieces from all eras are being brought together, which is a major event, as many of these works have never before been shown in Marseille. In this respect, the Louvre is an exceptional partner, lending us some forty major works, including Vermeer’s The Astronomer, a marvel of art history. The Bibliothèque nationale de France is lending us masterpieces of Arab-Muslim book art. The Musée d’Orsay has also been very generous, as have regional collections: Boulogne-sur-Mer with an extremely rare medieval manuscript, Chambéry with L’Astronome by Giordano… We are also presenting a fresco from Pompeii, and a silver celestial globe bearing one of the oldest known representations of the constellations. For the Mucem collections, the major event is the presentation of the cabinet of a very famous Parisian clairvoyant in the 1960s-1970s, the magician Belline, which will be completely reassembled, as if we were there!

From the current vogue for astrology to environmental issues, the exhibition also speaks of our world today…

J.B. We asked ourselves the question: what distinguishes an exhibition on the stars in 2025 from one created 25 years earlier? So we chose to keep an earthly point of view at all times, to draw attention to our own condition, our own environment, and to differentiate ourselves, for example, from the theme of the space race. Today, astrology is an important phenomenon, with around 40% of French people claiming to believe in it. It’s one of many ways of connecting with the stars as we perceive them from Earth, even if it no longer corresponds to current scientific knowledge. Other forms of connection with the night sky are also under threat, as artificial lighting makes it difficult to observe them in cities. We’re among the first generations to lose our connection with the night sky. And even among astrophysicists and astronomy enthusiasts, the movement of the gaze from the sky to the Earth is a common occurrence. Singularly, attention to the stars refocuses us on the preciousness of our environment.

How does contemporary art fit in with the course?

E.L.The exhibition is chronological, but we have chosen to include works by contemporary artists in all sections. This creates very interesting dialogues between the different periods, testifying to the transmission of a common heritage in the Mediterranean, a history of our link to the sky that is already several millennia old, but still very much alive!

J.B. The 16 artists on show have worked in various countries around the Mediterranean, in France, for example, but also in Morocco and Syria. Some are very famous, like Etel Adnan, while others are younger. Their works punctuate the itinerary, offering a variety of current viewpoints on the major themes of the exhibition. Abdelkader Benchamma, for example, revisits the beliefs associated with comets, while Caroline Corbasson works closely with contemporary astrophysics. We are also delighted to welcome a production specially conceived for the exhibition by Sara Ouhaddou, who has been exploring the cohabitation of different perspectives on the stars for several years, and whose research fits perfectly with the aim of “Reading the sky”!