@publicdomainrev
Online journal and not-for-profit project dedicated to curious and compelling works from the history of art, literature, and ideas. Featuring 300+ essays — ✍️ submissions welcome. We also have a mighty fine prints shop. https://publicdomainreview.org
#OnThisDay in 1665, the 1st issue of the @royalsociety's Philosophical Transactions was published — the oldest and longest-running scientific journal in the world. Here's our collection of some of its stranger pieces from over the centuries... publicdomainreview.org/collections/source/t... #otd
Born #onthisday in 1475, the great Michelangelo. Read about his role in the controversy of the once lost sculpture Laocoön and His Sons, in Monique Webber's essay "Who Says Michelangelo Was Right? Conflicting Visions of the Past in Early Modern Prints" — publicdomainreview.org/essay/w...
In these bewildering landscapes (ca. 1689) by Ferdinand van Kessel, 64 cities across 4 continents are depicted as mere backdrops to the antics of animals — the built environment of the human world almost superfluous. More here: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/kessel-four-parts-of-the-world
Celebrate #WorldBookDay with a look at some of the most beautiful and unusual examples from the first 100 years of the “modern” book cover, since the rise of publishers' bindings circa 1820: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/the-art-of-book-covers-1820-1914
Died #onthisday in 1815, Franz Mesmer, controversial proponent of "animal magnetism". More in our essay "Mesmerising Science" on how a craze for animal magnetism sessions in 18th-century Paris led to the modern clinical trial we know + love today: publicdomainreview.org/essay/m... #otd
The gritty fiction of Frank Norris — born #onthisday in 1870 — speaks of the everyday violence of modernity. @punkgroucho explores how this focus, combined with his unique approach to storytelling, helped to pave the way for a truly filmic style: publicdomainreview.org/essay/t... #OTD
In the 1850s, before it was denuded by archaeologists and the tourism industry, 420 species of flowers and plants grew on the Roman Colosseum — and every single one is catalogued in amateur botanist Richard Deakin's Flora of the Colosseum of Rome (1855): publicdomainreview.org/collection/r...
A few of the 53 "potted landscapes" made for each of the stations of the Tōkaidō road, the most important route in Edo-period Japan. After they were made the artist had a relatively obscure ukiyo-e artist named Utagawa Yoshishige to illustrate them: publicdomainreview.org/collection/5...
#OnThisDay in 1890, the Forth Bridge opened. Alison Metcalfe from the @natlibscot presents the Library’s collection of photos recording the bridge's construction, the 1st major structure in UK to be made of steel and milestone in civil engineering: publicdomainreview.org/essay/t... #otd
Exhibition title “on loop “ , March 6th to April 5th. Picture of little devils pulling wide an eye.
To all those in New York, our esteemed editor has chosen some images for a little exhibition at the Strother School of Radical Attention’s Sanctuary Gallery in Brooklyn. Opening on Friday, free RSVP here: www.schoolofattention.org/art-programs...
A few of the 28 spectacular "pattern poems" produced by the Frankish Benedictine monk Rabanus Maurus in his 9th-century work De laudibus sanctae crucis (In Praise of the Holy Cross). More examples, and an explanation of how they work, here: publicdomainreview.org/collection/m...
Javanese artist Raden Soelardi’s elegant 1919 illustrations of the shadow puppetry form known as wayang kulit: publicdomainreview.org/collection/j...
“Eastern Sports and Western Bodies”, Daniel Elkind's essay on the 19th-century exercise fad of club swinging and its links with the history of colonialism, immigration, and capitalist culture: https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/eastern-sports-and-western-bodies
We are partnering with Object podcast for its new season, Imagined Futures, exploring the visual culture of retrofuturism. First episode — Early Sci-Fi and Electric Visions — is out!
podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i...
Pages from a beautifully illustrated account of a journey made from Venice to the Middle East. Although the book was once purported to reflect a journey made in 1465 it is actually a German translation of an account from more than a century earlier: publicdomainreview.org/collection/j...
Flea as seen through a microscope, one of the many wonderful images from Micrographia (1665), the groundbreaking work of microscopy by English polymath Robert Hooke, who died #onthisday in 1703. Featured in our essay “Scurvy and the Terra Incognita”: publicdomainreview.org/essay/s... #otd
#SundayReads: Jonah Lubin and Maria Laurids Lazzarotti search for the origins of a pair of lurid “translations” from 1927 marketed as authentic tales by Giovanni Boccaccio: https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/pseudo-boccaccio-yiddish-pulp-fiction-and-the-man-who-ripped-off-joyce
Seed sowing time — entry for #March in the Labors of the Months section of the Très Riches Heures, probably the most important illuminated manuscript of the 15th century: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/labors-of-the-months-from-the-tres-riches-heures
Front cover to British Goblins (1880), a book of Welsh myth and folklore. Amongst the supernatural beings described are "Bwbachod", friendly goblins who help out with chores; and "Gwyllion", female fairies who haunt the mountain roads: https://buff.ly/3tjKPFI #StDavidsDay
More than a century before the mobile phone, a #Victorian love poem using #textspeak. See two even earlier examples here: https://publicdomainreview.org/collections/nineteenth-century-textspeak/
Beautiful diagrams from a circa 17th-century copy of Muslim polymath Ismail al-Jazarī’s *Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices*, originally published in 1206: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/arabic-machine-manuscript
.@circus_human on how the Silver Tree of Karakorum — a legendary 13th-century fountain — became a potent symbol, not only of the Mongol Empire’s imperial might, but also its downfall: https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/the-khans-drinking-fountain
Born #onthisday in 1533, the French philosopher Michel de Montaigne. Aged 38 he quit public life to devote himself to leisure, reading + reflection. He began writing experimental meditations he called “essais” and thus a new literary genre was born: publicdomainreview.org/collection/f... #OTD
Capricorn.
From John Bevis' Uranographia Britannica (ca. 1749), a watershed in the history of celestial atlases, being among the last to show allegiance to the old animated mythology of the heavens.
More in our latest post: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/bevis-uranographia
Happy #InternationalPolarBearDay! Read Michael Engelhard's essay "Darwin's Polar Bear" looking at the often overlooked role they played in the development of evolutionary theory: https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/darwin-s-polar-bear #polarbears
(Pictured: a circa 1808 etching by S. C. Miger.)
Northern Lights in Zenith, by Harald Moltke, 1900.
One of the many images of Aurora Borealis collected in our post “Firelight Flickering on the Ceiling of the World”, looking at how this otherworldly phenomenon has been depicted over the centuries: https://buff.ly/38dxgft
One of the first English recipes for “currey the Indian way”, to be served with rice “pellow”, from the 1751 edition of Hannah Glasse's Art of Cookery. More in our latest books post: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/the-art-of-cookery/
The creations of Sutherland Macdonald (ca. 1905), Victorian England's first professional tattoo artist. More here: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/sutherland-macdonald-tattoos #tattoo
One of the many wonderful illustrations featured in Omega: The Last Days of the Earth (1894), a #sciencefiction novel by 19th-century French astronomer and writer Camille Flammarion, who was born #onthisday in1842. More here: publicdomainreview.org/collection/o... #OTD #scifi
On May 31, 1921, several thousand white citizens and authorities began to violently attack the prosperous Black community of Greenwood in Tulsa, Oklahoma. @thinking4achang investigates the disturbing photographic legacy of the massacre: publicdomainreview.org/essay/p...