Online journal exploring works from the history of art, literature, and ideas. Featuring 300 essays — ✍️ submissions welcome. Also 900 prints in our shop!
Joined October 2010
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NEW ESSAY — In the Middle Ages, rumours spread across Europe of a strange hybrid creature, half-animal, half-plant, known as the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary. Thom Sliwowski traces the roots of this fabled zoophyte: publicdomainreview.org/essay…
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. @James_J_Conway on Magnus Hirschfeld and his pioneering 1904 study of queer Berlin: publicdomainreview.org/essay…
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True to the ideas held within — that blue light is bearer of unique and special properties — The Influence of the Blue Ray of the Sunlight (1877) is printed entirely with blue ink on blue paper: publicdomainreview.org/colle…
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How did alphabet books deal with the letter X before the rise of x-rays and xylophones? Here's some highlights: publicdomainreview.org/colle…
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Our Mid-Year Fundraiser is launched! publicdomainreview.org/suppo…
If you like what we do, and want to see it continue, then please do lend your support. Available to donors, our themed postcard packs: upcoming theme on... SOIL. (Shown here a past pack, themed on Light)
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Filippo Balbi, Testa Anatomica, 1854.
More on this unique Arcimboldo-esque painting here: publicdomainreview.org/colle… @ExploreWellcome
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#OnThisDay, Europe witnessed its largest meteorite fall in recorded history, over the Ukrainian village of Knjahynja. This drawing of the event was published by Austrian mineralogist Wilhelm Ritter von Haidinger. More meteors and comets in art here: publicdomainreview.org/colle… #OTD
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Diagram showing what various lunar eclipses would look like with differently shaped Earths. Johannes Buno, ca. 1711.⠀
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Featured in the German theologian and educator's Universal Geography. Buy a print here: publicdomainreview.org/produ…
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Forty-Four Turkish Fairy Tales (1913), a book of Turkish folk stories collected by Hungarian-born linguist Ignác Kúnos, with illustrations by Hungarian illustrator Willy Pogany: publicdomainreview.org/colle…
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"They were three months passing through the forest", an illustration (for Old French Fairy Tales, 1920) by Virginia Frances Sterrett who died of tuberculosis #onthisday in 1931, at the age of just 30. See more of her magical illustrations here: publicdomainreview.org/colle… #OTD
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For #WorldOceansDay today, stunning colour lithographs from William Saville-Kent's The Great Barrier Reef of Australia (1893), created from the author's original watercolour sketches: publicdomainreview.org/colle…
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A crowned woman in red inside a circle of water and holding a rose-topped caduceus; a representation of a stage in the process of alchemy, ca. 18th century.
Buy print here: publicdomainreview.org/produ…
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The Iranian city of Tabriz, as depicted by the 16th-century Ottoman polymath Matrakçı Nasuh, More here: publicdomainreview.org/colle…
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#SundayReads: Angela Vanhaelen tours the bawdy fountains, disorienting maze, and mechanical androids of a mysterious 17th-century Dutch pleasure park: publicdomainreview.org/essay… #longform
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Artwork by the famous foundling Kaspar Hauser, ranging from pen-and-ink self-portraits to watercolour studies of fruit and flowers: publicdomainreview.org/colle…
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Details from a 15th-century manuscript titled Vaticinia de Pontificibus depicting gloriously surreal portraits of various Popes in the midst of the prophecies relating to them. More here: publicdomainreview.org/colle…
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Japanese prints from 1873 depicting famous Western inventors and scholars in times of trouble. Pictured: Audubon (work eaten by mice), Carlyle (papers burnt), and Arkwright (spinning machine smashed by wife). More here: publicdomainreview.org/colle…
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With the 26 short comic dialogues that made up Dialogues of the Gods, the 2nd-century writer Lucian of Samosata took the popular images of the Greek gods and redrew them as greedy, sex-obsessed, power-mad despots: publicdomainreview.org/essay…
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Born #onthisday in 1868, the legendary Antarctic explorer Captain Robert Falcon Scott. Read about the remarkable photographs of his ill-fated final expedition and how this iconic visual record has helped to keep his legend alive: publicdomainreview.org/essay… #otd
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"General northward view, North Cape, Norway"; photochrom print published by Detroit Publishing Co., ca.1890-1900. More here: publicdomainreview.org/colle…
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Long before the 21st-century craze for adult colouring books came this 19th-century “painting book” from Walter Crane: publicdomainreview.org/colle…
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