The Public Domain Review

These 18th-century microscopic illustrations offer wonderful glimpses into the minutiae of the natural world.

Eigil zu Tage-Ravn asks a GTP-3-driven AI system for help in the interpretation of a key scene in Moby-Dick (1851). Do androids dream of electric whales?

Rising to prominence in the seventeenth century, the Basohli School of painting is particularly known for its vibrant use of color and inventive textural elements — including iridescent beetle carapaces.

Offering hundreds of examples from religious history, this book was part of a larger Phallic Series of treatises by Hargrave Jennings.

When the womb began to appear in printed images during the 16th century, it was understood through analogy: a garden, uroscopy flask, or microcosm of the universe. Rebecca Whiteley explores early modern birth figures, which picture the foetus in utero, and discovers an iconic form imbued with multiple kinds of knowledge: from midwifery know-how to alchemical secrets, astrological systems to new anatomical findings.

Munsell envisioned his atlas as a system akin to musical notation, which would liberate visual description from commercially-driven colour names.

In their imagination and satire, these prints reflected debates about education reform and the dissemination of knowledge in 1820s Britain.

In this strange book, marked “not for general perusal”, the use of excrement in medicine, magic, and culture is elevated to a universal aspect of human life.

In the 1930s, Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn, mystic and founder of the multidisciplinary Eranos forum, began compiling a diverse visual archive that would allow dreamers to cross-reference their visions with the entirety of cultural history. Frederika Tevebring explores this grandiose undertaking and its effect on the archivist, as images from the collection began to blur with her psyche.

This 1705 maze instructs Christians on the possible pathways to New Jerusalem (and dead-ends to be avoided).