[4] Dante and Beatrice in The Divine Comedy ascended through the sphere of fire to reach the Moon,[5] while three centuries later Benvenuto Cellini claimed in his autobiography to have bellowed so loud as to reach the sphere of fire.
[6] The contemporary astronomer Jofrancus Offusius estimated the distance to the sphere of fire from the earth in terms of multiples of the earth's diameter, and believed that comets emanated from the space between the sphere of fire and the moon.
[7] The rise of heliocentrism had by the early seventeenth century destroyed the very foundations for the concept of the sphere of fire.
[8] John Donne lamented in 1611 that "The new philosophy calls all in doubt,/The element of fire is quite put out".
[9] Nevertheless, Paracelsians like Robert Fludd continued as late as 1617 to present a picture of a geocentric cosmos, with the Elementum ignis still nestling immediately below the Sphera Lunae.