The Public Domain Review

Understanding the same laws to apply to both visual and aural beauty, David Ramsay Hay thought it possible not only to analyse such visual wonders as the Parthenon in terms of music theory, but also to identify their corresponding musical harmonies and melodies. Carmel Raz on the Scottish artist’s original, idiosyncratic, and occasionally bewildering aesthetics.

Photographs of plants captured in extraordinary detail, as if under the microscope, frozen into new forms almost beyond recognition.

The philosopher's method for creating a personalized encyclopedia of quotations.

A year after Goethe’s tale of teenage angst and suicide came this satire giving it a Hollywood ending.

Hot on the heels of the French revolution — by way of extravagant orgies, obscure taxonomies, and lemonade seas — Charles Fourier offered up his blueprint for a socialist utopia, and in the process also one of the most influential early critiques of capitalism. Dominic Pettman explores Fourier’s radical, bizarre, and often astonishingly modern ideas, and how they might guide us in our own troubled times.

Version from Olive Kline and Elsie Baker of one of the most popular hymn's of all time.

Eugène Grasset's wonderful pictorial summation of his key ideas about natural forms and decorative motifs.

The Swedish playwright's attempt to capture the night sky by the use of photographic plates alone.

In the early 1730s, a mysterious editor (known only as "Hurlothrumbo") committed to print a remarkable anthology: transcriptions of the graffiti from England's public latrines. For all its misogynistic and scatological tendencies, this little-known book of "latrinalia" offers a unique and fascinating window into Georgian life. Maximillian Novak explores.

Highlights from the many centuries of artworks to feature the iconic building — from its illuminated punctuation of medieval skylines to grainy detailed studies at the birth of photography.