What happens to levitation, one of the great imaginative figures of art and literature, in the transition from a religious culture to the disenchanted universe of modern science?
What becomes of ecstasy, rapture, ascension, transcendence, grace wh­e­n these give way to “space oddity”: man enclosed in a tin can floating far above the world?
Is the cosmonaut a prophet of the erotic future, avatar of man’­s stellar renaissance, as Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke once imagined? Or is he like Nietzsche’s madman, proclaiming as Gagarin himself was rumored to have said: “I don’t see any God up here”?

SB contributor Aaron Schuster is taking care of giving a series of answer proposals that will be published in Sang Bleu 5… Looking forward!

Nicolas de LARGILLIERE (1656-1746). Peintre français. 1. Etude de mains 1715, Musée du louvre.