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EssaysArt & Illustrations
![Moonblight and Six Feet of Romance: Dan Carter Beard’s Foray into Fiction](https://the-public-domain-review.imgix.net/essays/moonblight-and-six-feet-of-romance-dan-carter-beards-foray-into-fiction/14373845436_4f80c26e35_b.jpg?w=600&h=1200)
Moonblight and Six Feet of Romance: Dan Carter Beard’s Foray into Fiction
An esoteric disease which reveals things in their true light; three pairs of disembodied feet galavanting about the countryside - Abigail Walthausen explores the brief but strange literary career of Daniel Carter Beard, illustrator for Mark Twain and a founding father of the Boy Scouts of America. more
![1592: Coining Columbus](https://the-public-domain-review.imgix.net/essays/1592-coining-columbus/debry-columbus-detail.jpg?w=600&h=1200)
For many, the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the Americas is inextricably linked to a particular image: a small group of confident men on a tropical beach formally announcing their presence to the dumbfounded Amerindians. Michiel van Groesen explores the origins of this Eurocentric iconography and ascribes its persistence to the editorial strategy of the publisher who invented the initial design, a full century after Columbus' encounter. more
![Victorian Occultism and the Art of Synesthesia](https://the-public-domain-review.imgix.net/essays/victorian-occultism-and-the-art-of-synesthesia/thoughtformsthumb.jpg?w=600&h=1200)
Victorian Occultism and the Art of Synesthesia
Grounded in the theory that ideas, emotions, and even events, can manifest as visible auras, Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater’s Thought-Forms (1901) is an odd and intriguing work. Benjamin Breen explores these “synesthetic” abstractions and asks to what extent they, and the Victorian mysticism of which they were born, influenced the Modernist movement that flourished in the following decades. more
![Frederik Ruysch: The Artist of Death](https://the-public-domain-review.imgix.net/essays/frederik-ruysch-the-artist-of-death/12947091214_9f2c9ea811_o.jpg?w=600&h=1200)
Frederik Ruysch: The Artist of Death
Luuc Kooijmans explores the work of Dutch anatomist Frederik Ruysch, known for his remarkable ‘still life’ displays which blurred the boundary between scientific preservation and vanitas art. more
![Olaus Magnus’ Sea Serpent](https://the-public-domain-review.imgix.net/essays/olaus-magnus-sea-serpent/Munster_Thier_detail-4.jpg?w=600&h=1200)
The terrifying Great Norway Serpent, or Sea Orm, is the most famous of the many influential sea monsters depicted and described by 16th-century ecclesiastic, cartographer, and historian Olaus Magnus. Joseph Nigg explores the iconic and literary legacy of the controversial serpent from its beginnings in the medieval imagination to modern cryptozoology. more
![Time and Place: Eric Ravilious (1903-1942)](https://the-public-domain-review.imgix.net/essays/time-and-place-eric-ravilious-1903-1942/wilmington-ravilious.jpg?w=600&h=1200)
Time and Place: Eric Ravilious (1903-1942)
In many countries around the world the works of Eric Ravilious have come out of copyright this year – he died when his aircraft went missing off Iceland while he was making war paintings. An artist in multiple disciplines, his greater legacy dwells in water-colours. Frank Delaney re-visits the work of this understated, yet significant figure. more
![The Serious and the Smirk: The Smile in Portraiture](https://the-public-domain-review.imgix.net/essays/the-serious-and-the-smirk-the-smile-in-portraiture/9798784823_2f87663e79_o.jpg?w=600&h=1200)
The Serious and the Smirk: The Smile in Portraiture
Why do we so seldom see people smiling in painted portraits? Nicholas Jeeves explores the history of the smile through the ages of portraiture, from Da Vinci's Mona Lisa to Alexander Gardner's photographs of Abraham Lincoln. more
![Athanasius Kircher and the Hieroglyphic Sphinx](https://the-public-domain-review.imgix.net/essays/athanasius-kircher-and-the-hieroglyphic-sphinx/Sphynx-kirchefeaturedimage.jpg?w=600&h=1200)
Athanasius Kircher and the Hieroglyphic Sphinx
More than 170 years before Jean-François Champollion had the first real success in translating Egyptian hieroglyphs, the 17th century Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher was convinced he had cracked it. He was very wrong. Daniel Stolzenberg looks at Kircher's Egyptian Oedipus, a book that has been called “one of the most learned monstrosities of all times.” more
![Joseph Banks: Portraits of a Placid Elephant](https://the-public-domain-review.imgix.net/essays/joseph-banks-portraits-of-a-placid-elephant/banks-thumb.jpg?w=600&h=1200)
Joseph Banks: Portraits of a Placid Elephant
Patricia Fara traces the changing iconography of Joseph Banks, the English botanist who travelled on Captain Cook's first great voyage and went on to become President of the Royal Society and important patron for a whole host of significant developments in the natural sciences. more
![The Redemption of Saint Anthony](https://the-public-domain-review.imgix.net/essays/the-redemption-of-saint-anthony/redon-thumb.jpg?w=600&h=1200)
The Redemption of Saint Anthony
Gustave Flaubert, best known for his masterpiece Madame Bovary, spent nearly thirty years working on a surreal and largely 'unreadable' retelling of the temptation of Saint Anthony. Colin Dickey explores how it was only in the dark and compelling illustrations of Odilon Redon, made years later, that Flaubert's strangest work finally came to life. more
![Athanasius, Underground](https://the-public-domain-review.imgix.net/essays/athanasius-underground/fires-underground.jpeg?w=600&h=1200)
With his enormous range of scholarly pursuits the 17th-century polymath Athanasius Kircher has been hailed as the last Renaissance man and "the master of hundred arts". John Glassie looks at one of Kircher's great masterworks Mundus Subterraneus and how it was inspired by a subterranean adventure Kircher himself made into the bowl of Vesuvius. more
![John Martin and the Theatre of Subversion](https://the-public-domain-review.imgix.net/essays/john-martin-and-the-theatre-of-subversion/7495328686_f8710818b8_o.jpeg?w=600&h=1200)
John Martin and the Theatre of Subversion
Max Adams, author of The Prometheans, looks at the art of John Martin and how in his epic landscapes of apocalyptic scale one can see reflected his revolutionary leanings. more
![The Krakatoa Sunsets](https://the-public-domain-review.imgix.net/essays/the-krakatoa-sunsets/Krakatoa_eruption_lithograph-cut1.jpg?w=600&h=1200)
When a volcano erupted on a small island in Indonesia in 1883, the evening skies of the world glowed for months with strange colours. Richard Hamblyn explores a little-known series of letters that the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins sent in to the journal Nature describing the phenomenon - letters that would constitute the majority of the small handful of writings published while he was alive. more
![Painting the New World](https://the-public-domain-review.imgix.net/essays/painting-the-new-world/800px-North_carolina_algonkin-rituale02-540.jpg?w=600&h=1200)
In 1585 the Englishman John White, governor of one of the very first North American colonies, made a series of exquisite watercolour sketches of the native Algonkin people alongside whom the settlers would try to live. Benjamin Breen explores the significance of the sketches and their link to the mystery of what became known as the "Lost Colony". more
![Richard Dadd’s Master-Stroke](https://the-public-domain-review.imgix.net/essays/richard-dadds-master-stroke/dadd-thecrownpatriarch.jpg?w=600&h=1200)
Nicholas Tromans, author of Richard Dadd: The Artist and the Asylum, takes a look at Dadd's most famous painting The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke. more
![The Mysteries of Nature and Art](https://the-public-domain-review.imgix.net/essays/the-mysteries-of-nature-and-art/bate-titlepage.jpg?w=600&h=1200)
The Mysteries of Nature and Art
Julie Gardham, Senior Assistant Librarian at University of Glasgow's Special Collections Department, takes a look at the book that was said to have spurred a young Isaac Newton onto the scientific path, The Mysteries of Nature and Art by John Bate. more
![Navigating Dürer’s Woodcuts for The Ship of Fools](https://the-public-domain-review.imgix.net/essays/navigating-durers-woodcuts-for-the-ship-of-fools/narrenschiff-titlepage-cut.jpg?w=600&h=1200)
Navigating Dürer’s Woodcuts for The Ship of Fools
At the start of his career, as a young man in his twenties, Albrecht Dürer created a series of woodcuts to illustrate Sebastian Brant's The Ship of Fools of 1494. Dürer scholar Rangsook Yoon explores the significance of these early pieces and how in their subtlety of allegory they show promise of his masterpieces to come. more
![Robert Fludd and His Images of The Divine](https://the-public-domain-review.imgix.net/shop/oct_19_new_prints_00045.jpg?w=600&h=1200)
Robert Fludd and His Images of The Divine
Between 1617 and 1621 the English physician and polymath Robert Fludd published his masterpiece Utriusque Cosmi . . . Historia, a two-volume work packed with over sixty intricate engravings. Urszula Szulakowska looks at the philosophical and theological ideas behind the extraordinary images found in the first volume, an exploration of the macrocosm of the universe and spiritual realm. more
![Accuracy and Elegance in Cheselden’s Osteographia (1733)](https://the-public-domain-review.imgix.net/essays/accuracy-and-elegance-in-cheselden-s-osteographia-1733/cheselden_p09-5402.jpg?w=600&h=1200)
Accuracy and Elegance in Cheselden’s Osteographia (1733)
With its novel vignettes and its use of a camera obscura in the production of the plates, William Cheselden’s Osteographia, is recognized as a landmark in the history of anatomical illustration. Monique Kornell looks at its unique blend of accuracy and elegance. more
![Labillardière and his Relation](https://the-public-domain-review.imgix.net/essays/labillardiere-and-his-relation/prepraingrepast-540-cut.jpg?w=600&h=1200)
Labillardière and his Relation
When the French explorer Lapérouse went missing, a search voyage was put together to retrace his course around the islands of Australasia. On the mission was the naturalist Jacques Labillardière who published a book in 1800 of his experiences. Edward Duyker, author of Citizen Labillardière: A Naturalist’s Life in Revolution and Exploration (1755-1834), explores the impact of his pioneering work. more
![Beatus of Liébana](https://the-public-domain-review.imgix.net/essays/beatus-of-liebana/M644-f.87r-540-2.jpg?w=600&h=1200)
In a monastery in the mountains of northern Spain, 700 years after the Book of Revelations was written, a monk set down to illustrate a collection of writings he had compiled about this most vivid and apocalyptic of the New Testament books. Throughout the next few centuries his depictions of multi-headed beasts, decapitated sinners, and trumpet blowing angels, would be copied over and over again in various versions of the manuscript. John Williams, author of The Illustrated Beatus, introduces Beatus of Liébana and his Commentary on the Apocalypse. more
![The Life and Work of Nehemiah Grew](https://the-public-domain-review.imgix.net/essays/the-life-and-work-of-nehemiah-grew/grewtrunk3.jpg?w=600&h=1200)
The Life and Work of Nehemiah Grew
In the 82 illustrated plates included in his 1680 book The Anatomy of Plants, the English botanist Nehemiah Grew revealed for the first time the inner structure and function of plants in all their splendorous intricacy. Brian Garret explores how Grew's pioneering "mechanist" vision in relation to the floral world paved the way for the science of plant anatomy. more
![Lewis Carroll and The Hunting of the Snark](https://the-public-domain-review.imgix.net/essays/lewis-carroll-and-the-hunting-of-the-snark/snark-strip.jpg?w=600&h=1200)
Lewis Carroll and The Hunting of the Snark
In 1876 Lewis Carroll published by far his longest poem - a fantastical epic tale recounting the adventures of a bizarre troupe of nine tradesmen and a beaver. Carrollian scholar, Edward Wakeling, introduces The Hunting of the Snark. more
![The Snowflake Man of Vermont](https://the-public-domain-review.imgix.net/essays/the-snowflake-man-of-vermont/Wilson_Alwyn_Bentley_edit.jpg?w=600&h=1200)
Keith C. Heidorn takes a look at the life and work of Wilson Bentley, a self-educated farmer from a small American town who, by combining a bellows camera with a microscope, managed to photograph the dizzyingly intricate and diverse structures of the snow crystal. more