Des savants et des dieux

Cover illustrations for the series — Les Belles Lettres

For the Scholars and Gods series, published by Les Belles Lettres, I created the cover illustrations for a collection of books written by Pascal Richet, devoted to the history of science across different civilizations.

This series offers an original approach to scientific thought, reminding us that science never emerges in a vacuum. It is always shaped by a particular worldview, informed by the philosophical, religious, and metaphysical beliefs of each era.

Through the study of six major civilizations—Mesopotamia, Greece, Rome, the Islamic world, Byzantium, and the Latin West—Scholars and Gods traces more than 4,000 years of intellectual history. The series reveals the decisive influence of ideas, beliefs, and systems of thought on the development of scientific knowledge.

It also shows that, in the transmission of knowledge between civilizations, what is rejected can be just as meaningful as what is preserved. These choices shed new light on periods of scientific decline, as well as on resistance to new ideas and intellectual upheavals.

Solidly documented and based on the examination of thousands of archival sources, this investigation offers an original, rigorous, and compelling reading of the cultural conditions in which major scientific discoveries emerged.

The covers I designed for this series aim to translate visually this fertile tension between knowledge and belief, science and metaphysics, reason and imagination—through synthetic, symbolic, and historically grounded images, in keeping with the intellectual ambition of the collection.