Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) produced this extremely famous set of six watercolours of the Moon in its various phases "from life", as he observed the Earth's satellite through a telescope in the autumn of 1609. They represent the first realistic depiction of the Moon in history.
His observations, recorded and disseminated in his 1610 book Siderius Nuncius (Starry Messenger), transformed human understanding of the moon. While Renaissance science had inherited an ancient view of the moon as a perfectly spherical and unblemished orb, Galileo’s drawings revealed its surface to be more like that of our planet: rugged and uneven, marked by valleys, craters, and mountains.
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