Highlights from the many centuries of artworks to feature the iconic building — from its illuminated punctuation of medieval skylines to grainy detailed studies at the birth of photography. | Continue reading
Winnie Wong brings us a short biography of the Chinese curioso Pan Youxun (1745-1780). At issue? Hubris, hegemony, and global art history. | Continue reading
Its dizzy heights may have passed, but the fad for adult coloring books is far from over. Many trace the origins of such publications to a wave of satirical colouring books published in the 1960s, but as Melissa N. Morris and Zach Carmichael explore, the existence of such books, … | Continue reading
Rebecca Rego Barry on David Hosack, the doctor who attended Alexander Hamilton to his duel (and death), and creator of one of the first botanical gardens in the United States, home to thousands of species which he used for his pioneering medical research. | Continue reading
Angus Trumble on Dante Gabriel Rossetti and company's curious but longstanding fixation with the furry oddity that is the wombat — that 'most beautiful of God's creatures' which found its way into their poems, their art, and even, for a brief while, their homes. | Continue reading
Images from John Bulwer's 17th-century study on the language of the hands and gesture. | Continue reading
Our top pick of those whose works on 1st January 2018 enter the public domain in many countries around the world, including Kurt Schwitters, Marcel Duchamp, Sergei Eisenstein and Martin Luther King Jr. | Continue reading
Hokusai's five ghoulish prints for the series Hyaku Monogatari . | Continue reading
Defecating ducks, talking busts, and mechanised Christs — Jessica Riskin on the wonderful history of automata, machines built to mimic the processes of intelligent life. | Continue reading
Meiji era copies (ca. 1900) of original designs by Itō Jakuchū (1716–1800), a Japanese painter of the mid-Edo period notable for his striking modern aesthetic. | Continue reading
Benjamin Franklin, magnetic trees, and erotically-charged séances — Urte Laukaityte on how a craze for sessions of 'animal magnetism' in late 18th-century Paris led to the randomised placebo-controlled and double-blind clinical trials we know and love today. | Continue reading
Does each species have an optimal form? An ideal beauty that existed prior to the Fall? And if so could this be recreated on both paper and in life? These were questions that concerned both artists and breeders alike in the 17th century. Dániel Margócsy on the search for a menage … | Continue reading
Online journal and not-for-profit project dedicated to the exploration of curious and compelling works from the history of art, literature, and ideas. | Continue reading
Said to be spawn of the devil himself and possessed with great powers of prophetic insight, Mother Shipton was Yorkshire's answer to Nostradamus. Ed Simon looks into how, regardless of whether this prophetess witch actually existed or not, the legend of Mother Shipton has wielded … | Continue reading
Confronted with a bad frontispiece portrait of himself Milton enacted a very literary revenge on the engraver. | Continue reading
While imprisoned on St Helena, Napoleon started learning English. One resident of the island called his English “the oddest in the world.” | Continue reading
Deriving from the Spanish word for 'skulls', these calaveras were illustrations featuring skeletons which would, after Posada's death, become closely associated with the mexican holiday Día de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead. | Continue reading
With its dreamlike inversions and kaleidoscopic cast of anthropomorphic objects, animals, and plants, the world of French artist J. J. Grandville is at once both delightful and disquieting. Patricia Mainardi explores the unique work of this 19th-century illustrator now recognised … | Continue reading
Colour lithographs and photographs from the first book to extensively depict a coral reef using photography. | Continue reading
With his extravagant dress, entourage of exotic pets, and morbid fascinations, Count Stenbock is considered one of the greatest exemplars of the Decadent movement. David Tibet on the enigmatic writer’s short and curious life. | Continue reading
Bernd Brunner on the English naturalist Philip Henry Gosse and how his 1854 book The Aquarium, complete with spectacular illustrations and a dizzy dose of religious zeal, sparked a craze for the | Continue reading
Haeckel's stunning illustrations of medusae, in whose ethereal forms he glimpsed a reflection of his first wife, who died tragically at the age of 29. | Continue reading
Expensive and laborious to produce, a single woodcut could be recycled to illustrate hundreds of different ballads, each new home imbuing the same image with often wildly diverse meanings. Katie Sisneros explores this interplay of repetition, context, and meaning, and how in it c … | Continue reading
Images from an exquisitely illustrated Persian translation, thought to hail from 17th-century Mughal India, of Zakariya al-Qazwini's medieval treatise on all things wondrous. | Continue reading
Deadly fogs, moralistic diatribes, debunked medical theory - Brett Beasley explores a piece of Victorian science fiction considered to be the first modern tale of urban apocalypse. | Continue reading
The technique of intarsia — the fitting together of pieces of intricately cut wood to make often complex images — has produced some of the most awe-inspiring pieces of Renaissance craftsmanship. Daniel Elkind explores the history of this masterful art, and how an added dash of co … | Continue reading