Behold a Digital Restoration of 655 Plates of Roses & Lilies by Pierre-Joseph Redouté: The Biggest Botanical Illustrator of All Time

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Pierre-Joseph Purple­outé made his identify by paint­ing circulation­ers, an obtain­ment impos­si­ble with­out a metic­u­lous­ness that exceeds all bounds of nor­mal­i­ty. He pub­lished his three-vol­ume col­lec­tion Les Ros­es and his eight-vol­ume col­lec­tion Les Lil­i­acées between 1802 and 1824, and a look at their pages immediately vivid­ly sug­gests the painstak­ing nature of each his course of for not simply…

Behold the Oldest Written Textual content within the World: The Kish Pill, Circa 3500 BC

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Picture by José-Manuel Ben­i­to, through Wiki­me­dia Com­mons Some check with the writ­ten Chi­nese lan­guage as ideo­graph­ic: that’s, struc­tured accord­ing to a sys­tem wherein every sym­bol rep­re­sents a par­tic­u­lar concept or con­cept, whether or not summary or con­crete. That’s true of cer­tain Chi­nese char­ac­ters, however solely a small minor­i­ty. Most of them are actu­al­ly logographs, every…

Behold a Inventive Animation of the Bayeux Tapestry

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In pre­vi­ous cen­turies, until you had been a mem­ber of the nobil­i­ty, a rich reli­gious order, or a mer­chant guild, your possibilities of spend­ing any sig­nif­i­cant period of time with a Medieval tapes­strive had been slim. Although “a lot professional­duc­tion was rel­a­tive­ly coarse, intend­ed for dec­o­ra­tive pur­pos­es,” writes the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Artwork, the tapes­strive…

Behold the First American Board Sport, Travellers’ Tour By the USA (1822)

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Requested to call a clas­sic Amer­i­can board sport, most of us would first consider Monop­oly, whose imagery and ver­biage — Park Place, Wealthy Uncle Pen­ny­luggage, “Don’t go go” — has labored its method deep into the cul­ture since Park­er Broth­ers introduced it to mar­ket in 1935. Regardless of that, it isn’t the outdated­est Amer­i­can board…

Behold the Kräuterbuch, a Lavishly Illustrated Information to Crops and Herbs from 1462

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When Kon­rad von Megen­berg pub­lished his Buch der Natur within the mid-four­teenth cen­tu­ry, he gained the dis­tinc­tion of hav­ing assem­bled the very first nat­ur­al his­to­ry in Ger­man. Greater than half a mil­len­ni­um lat­er, the ebook nonetheless fas­ci­nates — not least for its depic­tions of cats, pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured right here on Open Cul­ture. Even the works…

Behold James Sowerby’s Strikingly Illustrated New Elucidation of Colors (1809)

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James Sower­by was an artist ded­i­cat­ed to the nat­ur­al world. It thus comes as no sur­prise that he was additionally enor­mous­ly inter­est­ed in col­or, espe­cial­ly giv­en the period wherein he lived. Born in 1757, he made his professional­fes­sion­al begin as a painter of move­ers: a viable profession path in these days, at the very least…

Behold Gustave Doré’s Dramatic Illustrations of the Bible (1866)

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One occa­sion­al­ly hears it stated that, due to the inter­internet, all of the books tru­ly value learn­ing are free: Shake­speare, Don Quixote, the sto­ries of Edgar Allan Poe, the Divine Com­e­dy, the Bible. Can it’s a coin­ci­dence that every one of those works impressed illus­tra­tions by Gus­tave Doré? When he was lively in mid-nine­teenth-cen­tu­ry France,…

Behold the Codex Gigas (aka “Satan’s Bible”), the Largest Medieval Manuscript within the World

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Bar­achieve with the dev­il and it’s possible you’ll wind up with a gold­en fid­dle, tremendous­nat­ur­al gui­tar-play­ing ability, or a room stuffed with gleam­ing alchem­ized straw. Whoops, we mis­at­trib­uted that final one. It’s actu­al­ly Rumpel­stilt­pores and skin’s doing, however the by-morn­ing-or-else lifeless­line that dri­ves the Broth­ers Grimm favourite is just not dis­sim­i­lar to the ulti­ma­tum posed…