'Surrender to a visionary experience goes hand in hand with that derisive toying with homunculi which recalls the early work, such as 'Fiat modes pereat ars'. Both moods find expression in 'Maximiliana', his masterpiece as an etcher. Its theme is the story of the astronomer Ernst Wilhelm Leberecht Tempel, who in nineteenth-century Germany could gain no recognition for his discoveries because he was self-taught and had no degree. The theme demanded of Max Ernst a double vision, the infinitely large being coupled with the infinitely small (and pretty). It called for a close view of men's narrow-mindedness, which in the book is demonstrated by documentary proof, and for a long-range view and experience of romantic interstellar spaces. The legible and illegible, the indecipherable, the unintelligible and the uncomprehending are combined in Max Ernst's magnificent Liber veritatis (W. Spies, Max Ernst, Das Graphische Werk, Menil Foundation, Houston and Verlag M. Du Mont Schauberg, Cologne, 1975)