Keywords: FlammarionWoodcut.jpg The Flammarion engraving is a wood engraving by an unknown artist that first appeared in Camille Flammarion's L'atmosphère météorologie populaire 1888 The image depicts a man crawling under the edge of the sky depicted as if it were a solid hemisphere to look at the mysterious Empyrean beyond The caption translates to A medieval missionary tells that he has found the point where heaven and Earth meet Camille Flammarion L'Atmosphere Météorologie Populaire Paris 1888 pp 163 1888 anonymous PD-old-100 <gallery> Image Flammarion jpg Original version 1888 without the original caption Image Universum jpg Recoloured 1998 </gallery> PD-old-100 Additional Information Camille Flammarion L'Atmosphere Météorologie Populaire Paris 1888 p 163 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 Paris 1888 a work on meteorology for a general audience The woodcut depicts a man peering through the Earth's atmosphere as if it were a curtain to look at the inner workings of the universe The original caption bellow the picture translated to A medieval missionary Bruno tells that he has found the point where heaven and Earth meet Flat Earth During the 19th century the Romantic conception of a European Dark Age gave much more prominence to the Flat Earth model than it ever possessed historically The widely circulated woodcut of a man poking his head through the firmament of a flat Earth to view the mechanics of the spheres executed in the style of the 16th century cannot be traced to an earlier source than Camille Flammarion's L'Atmosphere Météorologie Populaire Paris 1888 p 163 http //homepage mac com/kvmagruder/flatEarth/source html The woodcut illustrates the statement in the text that a medieval missionary claimed that he reached the horizon where the earth and the heavens met an anecdote that may be traced back to Voltaire but not to any known medieval source In its original form the woodcut included a decorative border that places it in the 19th century; in later publications some claiming that the woodcut did in fact date to the 16th century the border was removed Flammarion according to anecdotal evidence had commissioned the woodcut himself In any case no source of the image earlier than Flammarion's book is known quote from Flat Earth Flammarion Woodcut |