Flammarion Woodcut

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Image and caption from page 163 of L'atmosphère: météorologie populaire, by Camille Flammarion, 1888.

The Flammarion woodcut is an enigmatic woodcut by an unknown artist. It is referred to as the "Flammarion woodcut" because its first documented appearance is in page 163 of Camille Flammarion's L'atmosphère: météorologie populaire ("The Atmosphere: Popular Meteorology," Paris, 1888).

Contents

1 Description
2 History
3 See also
4 Trivia
5 References
6 External links

Description

The woodcut depicts a man, dressed as a medieval pilgrim and carrying a pilgrim's staff, peering through the sky as if it were a curtain to look at the inner workings of the universe. The caption in Flammarion's book translates as "A missionary of the Middle Ages tells that he had found the point where the sky and the Earth touched..." The image accompanies a text which reads, in part, "What, then, is this blue sky, which certainly does exist, and which veils from us the stars during the day?" The woodcut is often described as being medieval due to its visual style, its fanciful vision of the world, and to what appears to be a depiction of a flat Earth.

History

In an article published in 1957, astronomer Ernst Zinner wrote about the image and claimed that it was a Germanic engraving dating from the mid-16th century, but he was unable to find any version published earlier than 1906.E. Zinner, in Börsenblatt für den Deutschen Buchhandel, Frankfurt, 18 March 1957 Further investigation, however, revealed that the work was a composite of images characteristic of different historical periods, and that it had been made with a burin, a tool introduced for wood engraving in the early 19th century. The image was traced to Flammarion's book by Arthur Beer, an astrophysicist and historian of German science at Cambridge and, independently, by Bruno Weber, the curator of rare books at the Zürich central library.B. Weber, in Gutenberg Jahrbuch, p. 381, 1973

According to Weber and to astronomer Joseph Ashbrook,J. Ashbrook, Sky & Telescope, p. 356, May 1977 the depiction of a spherical heavenly vault separating the earth from an outer realm is similar to an illustration in Sebastian Münster's Cosmographia of 1544, a book which Flammarion, an ardent bibliophile and book collector, might have owned. The idea of a pilgrim finding the place where the Earth and sky meet might have been inspired by a medieval legend associated with Saint Macarius, a legend which Flammarion recounts in detail in his book Les mondes imaginaires ("The Imaginary Worlds," 1865). Flammarion had been apprenticed at the age of twelve to an engraver in Paris and it is believed that many of the illustrations for his books were engraved from his own drawings, probably under his supervision. Therefore it is highly plausible that Flammarion himself created the image, though this has not been conclusively ascertained.

The image is perhaps best known as the cover illustration for Daniel J. Boorstin's The Discoverers (1983), a best-selling account of the history of science. The Flammarion woodcut has been used in many other contexts to illustrate either the scientific or the mystical quests for knowledge.

Trivia

The ending of the film The Truman Show may have been inspired by the Flammarion woodcut.

References

External links