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Banana Tree Flower with Io Moth, by Maria Sibylla Merian — who was born #onthisday in 1647.
From her pioneering Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium (Insects of Suriname), first published in 1705.
See more prints by her in our online prints shop: https://t.co/ASX37Nx31n
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): https://t.co/OEtpMfAJtM
Engraving by François-Nicolas Martinet from an anonymous Chinese drawing, featured in Edme Billardon-Sauvigny's Histoire naturelle des dorades de la Chine (1780).
Available as a print in our online shop: https://t.co/Hl8vuLOLOy
Happy #WorldBookDay! Explore our collection of more than 300 weird and wonderful titles from the past, all free to download and explore (via @internetarchive): https://t.co/MOrpHd35ud
(Pictured: Giuseppe Arcimboldo's The Librarian, 1566)
Popular in the 18th and 19th centuries, the “Steps of Life” genre was based on the idea that one's life can be thought of as divisible into distinct stages, depicted on a set of ascending then descending steps. More examples here: https://t.co/H1nYmTd4IQ
Pages from a 1902 issue of Shin-Bijutsukai (New Oceans of Art), a design magazine produced at a watershed in Japanese publishing history: when pattern books became standalone works of art: https://t.co/uiFmRSL1S3
Geographical Fun (1868), a series of fantastic anthropomorphic maps of European countries, drawn by an unnamed 15-year-old girl who had the idea for the novel maps "when seeking to amuse a brother confined to his bed by illness": https://t.co/GGWRKEdJBb
Fancy pigeons from Emil Schachtzabel's Illustriertes Prachtwerk sämtlicher Taubenrassen (1906). More here: https://t.co/xI5yKfUgvR
Illustrations from the beguiling Clavis Artis, a German alchemical manuscript which claims to hail from the 13th century and have pages made from dragon skin: https://t.co/3QEsmte3mP
Chemistry of Combustion and Illumination, a diagram from Edward Livingston Youmans' Chemical Atlas; or, The Chemistry of Familiar Objects (1856). ⠀
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Order as a print here: https://t.co/wZfks20WDT