Astronomy Buff

The Flammarion Woodcut

by Tony on March 12th, 2008

This is a colored version of the famous woodcut.

I am frequently asked about the image at the beginning of my Hubble Deep Field video.

It a fascinating picture that expresses and symbolizes the wonderment, passion and curiosity of new scientific discovery into space (which is precisely why I chose this picture to be the first image of the HDF video clip). It is also quite mysterious and alluring, with all of the fine eye-catching detail depicting a man curiously reaching out beyond the firmament/atmosphere of the earth to understand the heavens. Because of this, it has long been a decoration in my office for many years.

The Flammarion woodcut looks like it’d be a painting (when it is colored in) or a drawing, but it was originally a woodcut that was traced onto paper. Think: Gutenberg type printing press–the way they used to stamp everything onto paper using wooden stamp templates in order to mass produce books. The Flammarian woodcut was made for the purpose of mass print to the page.

Being called the Flammarion Woodcut, you’d think that a guy named Flammarian made it, but the fact is, the woodcut is only known as the “Flammarion Woodcut” because it first appeared in Camille Flammarion’s book called L’atmosphère: météorologie populaire (”The Atmosphere: Popular Meteorology”) in 1888. But nobody really knows whom the artist who carved the original image was. Many people think that the picture was really of medieval origins (b/c of the flat earth, firmament, style, etc.)

Who knows, maybe Flammarion did make it….

Cammille Flammarion could have made it. He was a French astronomer (awwwww. Haw.haw astronomy) And he knew how to make the woodcuts; there is evidence that he made several engravings for his book and he was pretty artistic. But, still, there is no evidence he made this particular woodcut.

So maybe he didn’t make it.

I like mysteries.

Beneath the print of the woodcut a caption that, when translated from French to English, said “A medieval missionary tells that he has found the point where heaven [the sense here is ’sky’] and Earth meet…”.

The Flammarian woodcut IS a pretty strange.

If you look at the picture closely, you can see all kinds of symbolism: the faces of the sun and moon, the spoked wheel in the sky, the giant tree in the middle of the earth that makes everything else by comparison look puny, and the numerology of the engravings (ie. the number of points in the star, spokes, in the wheel, etc.). If I were all into this kind of thing, I’d be all up in this, analyzing every little line of this picture like those History Channel shows that analyze the writings and drawings of Nostradamus and the secret symbols of the dollar bill. Actually, I am surprised that people are not looking at this more closely. This picture may contain the date of Armageddon!

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