This engraving—”Empedocles Breaks through the Crystal Spheres”—recalls Nicolaus Copernicus’s discoveries. It first appeared in 1888 in a book by Camille Flammarion with the caption: “A missionary of the Middle Ages tells that he had found the point where the sky and the Earth touch.”
I colored this version inspired by the cinematic techniques of The Wizard of Oz.
Nicolas Camille Flammarion (26 February 1842 – 3 June 1925) was a French astronomer and author. He was a prolific author of over fifty titles, including popular science works about astronomy, several notable early science fiction novels, and works on psychical research and related topics. He also published the magazine L’Astronomie starting in 1882.
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.
Empedocles c. 494 – c. 434 BC) was a Greek pre-Socratic philosopher and a native citizen of Akragas, a Greek city in Sicily. Empedocles’ philosophy is best known for originating the cosmogonic theory of the four classical elements. He also proposed forces he called Love (Aphrodite) and Strife (Eris), which would mix and separate the elements, respectively.