This engraving – “Empedocles Breaks through the Crystal Spheres” – is reminiscent of the discoveries of Nicolaus Copernicus. 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.”
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.
I created this version inspired by the cinematic techniques of the Wizard of Oz.
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.