Focuses on Ovid’s portrayal of the armillary sphere of Archimedes in book 6 of the Fasti. Ovid, taking a certain cue from Cicero, turns to the armillary sphere of Archimedes to develop an ekphrastic vision of the universe, which on initial glance appears to be divinely designed. The armillary sphere is envisaged as a miniature representation of the cosmos, with its creator operating as a foil for a creationist divinity, closely associated with the divine craftsman or demiurge from Plato’s Timaeus. The armillary sphere, however, also presents a series of challenges to both human and divine craftsmanship. It highlights the fallacy of human attempts to create working replicas of the complex movements of the heavenly bodies, while also indicating how the cosmos might be seen as dependent upon such models for its very generation. Despite being fundamentally flawed, models of the cosmos have the capacity to construct the realities they depict, while the multiplicity of such models (and the philosophical systems they are based upon) continues to disturb our sense of a fixed and stable reality.