Hyginus’s work On astronomy deals especially with a mythological origin of constellations and their mutual positions on the sky. It is based on Eratosthenes’s Katasterismoi and Aratos’s Fainomena (depending on Eudoxos’s not preserved work and on other writings). In Middle Ages, Aratos’s, (Pseudo-)Eratoshenes’s and Hyginus’s works were copied both in their „original“ form, and in the form of scholia and commentaries, which became a base for Michael Scotus’s treatise De signis (c. 1220), the edition of which was published by Silke Ackermann in 2009.

The contribution deals with the iconography of the Ratdolt’s collection of woodcuts published in his first edition of Hyginus’s Astronomy (1482) and several times later (1485, Thomas de Blavis 1488, Ratdolt 1491 etc.). It is concluded, that the Ratdolt’s woodcuts are strongly influenced by Michael’s text and by medieval tradition of his predecessors. These woodcuts are not thus entirely appropriate to illustrate Hyginus’s text; many of them are obscure without knowledge of Michael’s text.