On 12 August, the Moon will slide in front of the Sun over much of Spain, turning midday into twilight for a few minutes. It will be the first total solar eclipse visible from the Iberian Peninsula in over a century, and astronomy groups are already preparing viewing events. But this will not be the first time an eclipse has left humanity staring skyward, nor the first time someone has tried to fix it on canvas.
Long before astronomy became a science, an eclipse was a portent. The Nebra Sky Disc, a Bronze Age bronze artefact found near Halle in Germany, brings together the Sun, the Moon and the Pleiades on a single object. It does not show an eclipse as such, but it is the earliest known European attempt to give visual form to the movements of the heavens. Herodotus recorded how a solar eclipse halted a battle between the Medes and the Lydians in Asia Minor, a sign both sides took as a divine command to stop fighting.
Faith and fear in the Middle Ages
Medieval artists found in the eclipse a powerful narrative for the death of Christ. The Italian painter Taddeo Gaddi depicted a Moon approaching the Sun above the cross in a triptych from around 1330, now at the New-York Historical Society. A century later, an anonymous Valencian artist painted a Crucifixion now in Madrid's Thyssen-Bornemisza museum, but the ochre-coloured Sun suggests the painter had probably never witnessed a real total eclipse and was working from imagination.
The phenomenon also appeared alongside other wonders. The Augsburg Book of Miracles, an illuminated manuscript from the mid-16th century, illustrates the total eclipse of 1483 together with the locust plague that devastated Italy that same year, pairing celestial and terrestrial disasters.
Baroque ambition and scientific curiosity
With the Baroque, depictions of eclipses gained technical ambition without losing their symbolic weight. José de Ribera painted a nearly translucent lunar disc in his Christ Crucified of 1643, now in Vitoria, allowing the Sun's outline to show through. Peter Paul Rubens went further in The Elevation of the Cross (1610–1611) for Antwerp Cathedral, rendering the beginning of an eclipse with striking realism, though he had to draw the full contour of the Moon so viewers could recognise both bodies.
Not all such paintings were religious. Antoine Caron's canvas from around 1570–1580, now at the Getty in Los Angeles, is titled Dionysius the Areopagite converting the pagan philosophers but is better known as Astronomers observing a solar eclipse. A celestial globe, an armillary sphere and a figure doing geometric calculations reveal that the painter's real interest was the astronomical event itself.
By the 18th century, Donato Creti produced a series of oils on astronomical observations for Count Marsili, who presented them to Pope Clement XI to persuade him to fund an observatory in Bologna. The ploy worked, and the observatory was built shortly afterwards.
Romanticism and the sublime
The 19th century, with its taste for the grand and the inexplicable, produced some of the most memorable eclipse scenes. Ippolito Caffi painted the eclipse of 8 July 1842 over Venice from an aerial perspective in Solar eclipse over Fondamenta Nove. The Russian painter Ivan Aivazovsky, better known for seascapes, turned the total eclipse he observed in 1851 from Feodosia into a kind of nocturne.
The phenomenon also lent itself to political satire. A French almanac from 1706 showed Louis XIV on his throne before the Sun, alluding to his nickname of the 'Sun King', and included in one corner the eclipse of 12 May that year, which coincided with a French military defeat during the siege of Barcelona.
When the paintbrush served science
Towards the end of the 19th century, before photography could properly capture the solar corona, some artists became instruments of precision. The Frenchman Étienne Léopold Trouvelot, better known today for accidentally introducing the gypsy moth into the United States, found his true vocation in astronomical drawing. He travelled with his son to Creston, Wyoming, to observe the total eclipse of 29 July 1878, and his work was later published as a chromolithograph in a portfolio of 15 plates.
A few decades later, the American Howard Russell Butler took that documentary vocation even further. He used a telescope and a clock to time his sketches, capturing the corona's structure with remarkable accuracy. His paintings were used by astronomers to study the Sun's outer atmosphere.
In the 20th century, the eclipse moved from the heavens to the gallery. Roy Lichtenstein's pop art Solar Eclipse (1975) stripped the event of its cosmic awe and turned it into a graphic, almost comic-book image, a reminder that even the most sublime natural phenomena can be reimagined through the lens of contemporary culture.
As Spain prepares for its moment of darkness, the long history of eclipse painting reminds us that these few minutes have always been more than a scientific curiosity. They are a canvas for faith, fear, and the human urge to make sense of the sky. For those planning to watch, free certified glasses are available in many towns along the path of totality. And for a deeper look at how ancient Europeans predicted such events, the Antikythera mechanism shows that the fascination with eclipses is as old as civilisation itself.
