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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…