From Humboldt to Hubble: from Humboldt who, with the publication of his famous Cosmos, was the first to make a complete inventory of the planet Earth, but also the last great encyclopedist to embody the dream of a universal knowledge, to Humble, the telescope which at the close of the century, opens up the most amazing galactic spaces to the human eyes. In what way did the journey and discoveries made by between the beginning of romanticism and the end of the Avant-garde shape modern sensitivity? The landscape became a superior form of art precisely at a time when the notion of Sublime replaced the ancient theory of Beauty. America was, not by chance but in view of its very nature, the ideal place for the major shift. It is owing to Humboldt's influence that the first great American landscape painters, Church, Moran, and Cole, and photographers, like Muybridge, Sullivan, Carleton Watkins, made topographical and scientific surveys and shared this aesthetic thrill of the horizons of a land offering itself as a new Promised Land. If the Old World was the world of the fall and corruption, the New World was imagined as the new Garden of Eden. This almost religious aspect of an eschatology, a revelation or even an apocalypse will be illustrated by all modern movements, from Italian Futurism to Russian Suprematism. Balla in Italy trascribed the revolutions of Mercury and the planets. Kupra, Brancusi and Delauny participated in this cosmic celebration. In the 30's, Masson, Miro', Picasso and Calder will pursue this tradition of bodies moving in space, referring to their different works by one term "Constellations". In the 50's, Yves Klein will further develop these fantasies in his Cosmologies.