The Public Domain Review

Over the course of a year, Thomas Carlyle supposedly transmitted this text to Dr. Wm. J. Bryan from beyond the grave.

This portrait, believed to be the work of Marie-Denise Villers, encodes questions of gender and artistry in late-eighteenth century France.

Inkblot books were part bestiary, part parlor-game séance, cataloging those creatures that seemed to crawl out of the inkwell with the slightest encouragement.

Built for his son from the scraps of daily life — matchboxes, beef bones, nutshells, and plaster — Paul Klee’s hand puppets harbour ghosts of human feelings, fragile communications from a world most adults have left behind. Kenneth Gross compares these enchanted objects to angelic figures, in Klee’s artworks and the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, helping us dance as well as wrestle with their visions of innocence.

Echoing the work of Giuseppe Arcimboldo, a composite head comprised of a tortuous tangle of écorché-like figures.

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As historical documents, the surviving editions of Harris’s List offer today’s readers a rare glimpse into London's 18th-century sex trade.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