Order your eclipse glasses now, in other words, and book a trip to my part of the country, where we will have the best view.

Of course, there is another, less literal way to experience the mystery of an eclipse. For thousands of years, people in cultures around the world have depicted eclipses in art, imbuing them with fear and dread and a heavy dose of the supernatural. A Chinese myth held that eclipses happened when a sky dragon dined on our star. In the Americas, the Inca had a similar tale, only the hungry beast was a jaguar.

In Western Europe during the Middle Ages, eclipses took on a dual meaning, and became a means for expressing varieties of both religious and scientific experience.

“In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, astronomy and solar eclipses were a huge craze. Virtually anyone who considered himself an educated person then took an interest in art and science, in a way that doesn’t really happen anymore,” says Ian Blatchford, director of the Science Museum in London. The popularization of telescopes and printing presses brought astronomical knowledge into middle class homes, he says. It was also a time of discovery, with new planets like Uranus and Neptune brought into the celestial fold, as well as new moons around distant worlds.

By the time of the Enlightenment, eclipse artwork played a surprisingly important role in science, he says: “There are intriguing occasions when the artistic eye has been of real utility to the scientific process.”

An art historian who runs the UK’s national science museum, Blatchford recently searched the museum’s collections for representations of eclipses, for a paper on their role in the history of astronomy. He says he was especially struck by artists’ ability to capture the ethereal nature of an eclipse in a way that even photographs can’t.

“When an eclipse happens, you only have a tiny amount of time to observe what’s going on. But of course artists have a great skill of absorbing everything,” he says.

In early Christian art, eclipses appeared in scenes of the crucifixion to signify the anger of God and to represent the collective grief of the universe, Blatchford says. The Gospels tell of a darkened sky at the time of Christ’s death, which some scholars have interpreted as an eclipse. From Luke 23: 44-45: “It was now about the sixth hour and darkness fell over the whole land until the ninth hour, because the sun was obscured and the veil of the temple was torn in two.”

By the Italian Renaissance, paintings still held religious meaning, but their depictions of the sky and stars were drawn from early modern astronomy, Blatchford says.

Of all Blatchford’s finds, my favorite is a 1735 painting by German painter Cosmas Damian Asam. It depicts St. Benedict, who is said to have experienced a vision of the whole world “gathered together under a sunbeam.” This is a fitting analogy for a solar eclipse, but what astonishes me about this painting is its rich detail. You can see not only the eclipse, but the solar corona, and the so-called “diamond ring effect,” which occurs when sunlight streams through lunar mountains. Here it falls right on the saint’s head.