Man has gazed at stars since he raised his head. First, he worshipped them, then measured, then flew. But there was art between these stages. The cosmos in painting, literature, music is not just a backdrop. It is an attempt to make sense of infinity, one's place in it, fear, and awe. From ancient myths to "Dune," from frescoes to installations — we speak of the cosmos when words fail. This article is a journey through the starry paths of creativity. Antiquity and the Middle Ages: the cosmos as order For the Greeks, the cosmos was not a void but harmony. Plato and Aristotle described the celestial spheres, but poets did not lag behind. Hesiod in "Theogony" told of the origin of the celestial bodies. Stars were living beings, gods. In the Middle Ages, the cosmos became a religious heaven: frescoes depicting Christ in the mandorla, surrounded by angels and planets. Dante's "Divine Comedy" is a journey through three realms, where the cosmos is a map of morality. In the visual arts — Giotto's frescoes, where the sky is no longer conditional but blue with golden stars. The Renaissance: the cosmos of man Copernicus, Galileo — science destroyed the old picture of the world, but art did not lag behind. Raphael's fresco "The School of Athens" connects the earthly and the celestial. In Bosch's "Garden of Earthly Delights," cosmic landscapes mesmerize. Astronomy enters painting: in Vermeer's "The Astronomer," a man studies the sky. Literature: Milton's "Paradise Lost" — a cosmic battle of angels, cosmology in verse. The Renaissance showed that the cosmos can be known by man, and art — his ally. Enlightenment and Romanticism: the sublime and the infinite In the 18th century, the cosmos became an object of scientific interest. But the Romantics brought back its mystery. Caspar David Friedrich's paintings — man against the starry sky, small and lost. Turner's cosmic whirls, precursors of abstraction. Goethe (both a poet and a scientist) wrote about color and light. "Fau ... Read more