The Public Domain Review

The story of Alexander the Great descending into the sea in a diving bell has led to diverse visual representations across countries, languages, and centuries.

As historical documents, the surviving editions of Harris’s List offer today’s readers a rare glimpse into London's 18th-century sex trade.

Idling alongside the waters of artificial grottoes, visitors found themselves in lush, otherworldly settings, where art and nature, pleasure and peril, and humans and nymphs could, for a time, coexist. Laura Tradii spelunks through the handmade caves of the Italian Renaissance and their reception abroad, illuminating how these curious spaces transformed across the centuries.

This etching seems to speak to the Enlightenment’s mission to give order to the natural world.

These hand-coloured scientific illustrations — on poster-sized linen swaths designed to be hung on classroom walls — are striking for their modern abstraction.

Published by Thames and Hudson, the trade edition of Affinities will be out in the UK on May 26th and in the US on June 7th.

Pamphlet, printed in Philadelphia, describing strange sky phenomena witnessed over Riga and Kirschberg.

Before humans stored memories as zeroes and ones, we turned to digital devices of another kind — preserving knowledge on the surface of fingers and palms. Kensy Cooperrider leads us through a millennium of “hand mnemonics” and the variety of techniques practised by Buddhist monks, Latin linguists, and Renaissance musicians for remembering what might otherwise elude the mind.

In "stream of time" charts, Friedrich Strass and later artists depict human history as bodies of flowing water.

In the Renaissance ostentatio genitalium tradition, the visual virility of Christ affirms his divinity.