Flammarion woodcut
A couple weeks ago, for reasons I can't remember offhand, I was trying to figure out the name of a particular piece of art. It shows a person at the edge of the world, sticking their head through the dome of the heavens to see the workings of the cosmos. I think my parents had a poster of this when I was a kid.
I think of it most often in an sf context: James Blish wrote a story once called "Surface Tension," later reprinted in his collection The Seedling Stars (and imo by far the best of that set of stories). In an introduction to the story somewhere, he wrote that the piece of art I'm talking about (which, iIrc, he hadn't seen 'til long after he wrote the story) was another representation of the same kind of thing that readers loved about "Surface Tension"--the sense of wonder in breaking through the surface of the world and seeing what lies beyond.
So anyway, I tried searching online for this artwork, but I could only try to describe it, 'cause I didn't know what it was called. I should've asked on a mailing list, but instead I gave up.
And then yesterday one of my father's books had the piece on the front cover, and inside there was another copy of it and a mention of Flammarion. A quick Google led me to Wikipedia's article on the piece, which turns out to be generally known as the Flammarion woodcut; its artist is unknown, but its first known publication was as an illustration in an 1888 meteorology book by French author and astronomer Camille Flammarion, who also wrote science fiction. And who was memorialized by Alexei Panshin in the Anthony Villiers books (hey! my review is the first search result for [Anthony Villiers]!); Star Well is located in the Flammarion Rift.
On a side note, the Wikipedia page on Flammarion himself includes a long quote from him, of which this is an excerpt:
[...If] humankind [...] knew what profound inner pleasure await those who gaze at the heavens, then France, nay, the whole of Europe, would be covered with telescopes instead of bayonets, thereby promoting universal happiness and peace.
--Camille Flammarion, 1880
Yeah, Camille, but what happens if two people want to use the same telescope at the same time? WHAT THEN? I bet they'll be wishing they had their bayonets back!