The Public Domain Review

This is just an automatic copy of Public Domain Review blog.

The Polyhedral Perspective

Wednesday 12 October 2022 at 11:50

When geometrical solids took hold of the Renaissance imagination, they promised the quintessence of the third dimension in its pure and unadulterated form. Noam Andrews discovers how polyhedra descended from mathematical treatises to artists’ studios, distilling abstract ideas into objects one could see and touch.

Source: https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/polyhedral-perspective


Fungi Collected in Shropshire and Other Neighbourhoods (1860–1902)

Tuesday 11 October 2022 at 10:30

Bound into three exquisitely colored volumes, Fungi features hundreds of species, collected across 42 years by a female mycologist named M. F. Lewis.

Source: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/fungi-of-shropshire


“Mother Will Be Pleased”: How It Feels to Be Run Over (1900)

Thursday 6 October 2022 at 08:15

One of the earliest uses of intertitles, Hepworth’s film belongs to a genre of fin-de-siècle accident pictures, where we can observe cinema discovering new forms of communication.

Source: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/how-it-feels-to-be-run-over


Evrard d'Espinque’s Illuminations of De Proprietatibus Rerum (ca. 1480)

Tuesday 4 October 2022 at 10:45

Among the loveliest illuminations of Bartholomaeus Anglicus' encyclopedia, Evrard d'Espinque's illuminations use a T-O pattern to trace the Great Chain of Being.

Source: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/despinque-anglicus-illuminations


Hypnerotomachia Poliphili and the Architecture of Dreams

Wednesday 28 September 2022 at 11:12

With its otherworldly woodcuts and ornate descriptions of imagined architecture, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili brims with an obsessive and erotic fixation on form. Demetra Vogiatzaki accompanies the hero as he wanders the pages of this quattrocento marvel, at once a story of lost love and a fever dream of antiquity.

Source: https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/hypnerotomachia-poliphili-and-the-architecture-of-dreams


The Turns of the Turnverein: Heinrich Hamann’s Gymnastic Photographs (ca. 1902)

Tuesday 27 September 2022 at 15:08

More than a set of techniques to improve individual fitness, Johann Friedrich Ludwig Christoph Jahn’s gymnastics were meant to train a new form of body politic.

Source: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/hamann-turner


The Kumatologist: Vaughan Cornish’s Wave Studies (1910–14)

Thursday 22 September 2022 at 13:49

After a transformative moment on the Devon Coast, Vaughan Cornish devoted his life to the study of waveforms.

Source: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/cornish-waves


The Blood Collages of John Bingley Garland (ca. 1850–60)

Tuesday 20 September 2022 at 13:58

Some 50 years before collage would become an established art form, came these pioneering Victorian images all of which exude a certain decorative detail: blood.

Source: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/garland-blood-collages


Colonizing the Cosmos: Astor’s Electrical Future

Wednesday 14 September 2022 at 08:57

During America’s Gilded Age, the future seemed to pulse with electrical possibility. Iwan Rhys Morus follows the interplanetary safari that is John Jacob Astor’s A Journey in Other Worlds, a high-voltage scientific romance in which visions of imperialism haunt a supposedly “perfect” future.

Source: https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/colonizing-the-cosmos


Trimalchio in Newburyport: Timothy Dexter’s A Pickle for the Knowing Ones (1848)

Tuesday 13 September 2022 at 08:27

A strange 1797 text — in a personal eye dialect and entirely devoid of punctuation — written by the eccentric 18th-century businessman known for his wildly good luck.

Source: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/dexter-pickle