1888 AD FRANCE FLAMMARION CAMILLE ENGRAVING

A traveller pushes his head through the edge of the sky and sees the machinery beyond. The image looks medieval, and for most of the twentieth century serious scholars agreed: Heinz Strauss and Heinrich Röttinger dated it to the sixteenth century, Erwin Panofsky to the seventeenth. All of them were wrong. It first appears on page 163 of Camille Flammarion's L'atmosphère: météorologie populaire, Paris, 1888 – a nineteenth-century wood engraving in deliberate pastiche of Renaissance style, carrying a caption written to sound older than it is.

The artist has never been identified. Flammarion himself trained as an engraver, which leaves open the possibility that the most famous illustration of the medieval cosmos was made by the astronomer who published it. The colour versions in circulation are all modern; the original is black and white.

The card

• Date — 1888 AD, first documented appearance
• Where — Paris, France. Country-level pin: a printed book has no find-site
• Six views — the coloured state above, the original monochrome below, each read from wheel detail to star to full plate
• Correction — earlier notes here gave page 183. It is page 163

Works Cited

• Flammarion, Camille. L'atmosphère: météorologie populaire. Paris: Hachette, 1888, p.163.
• Flammarion engraving, on the dating and its discredited attributions.
• The Public Domain Review, "Wheels Within Wheels".
• Gallica, BnF — the 1888 edition, digitised.

Works Cited

• Source, Title, Publisher, Year.