Apr 24 2007
Faith in Art
This is the Flammarion Woodcut, which probably isn’t actually a woodcut, but rather a wood carving. It 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. One of the elements of the cosmic machinery bears a strong resemblance to traditional pictorial representations of the “wheel in the middle of a wheel” described in the visions of the prophet Ezekiel. The caption 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?”‘
Flammarion (1842-1925) was a bibliophile and book collector, astronomer and engraver.
The image of a pilgrim encountering a spherical heavenly vault separating the earth from the heavens appeared in Flammarion’s Les mondes imaginaires et les mondes réels (”The Imaginary Worlds and the Real Worlds,” 1865) and was probably created by the author.
I find this image interesting because it speaks to me of our desire to understand the world around us in light of Scripture.
