The Public Domain Review

Angels emerge from avian eggs and a figure climbs a ladder to the moon, in Blake's unique take on the emblems tradition.

Inspired by Jules Verne’s scientific novels, The electric life has garnered retrospective praise for successfully anticipating much of modern life.

The nineteenth-century images collected here concern hatha yoga, the yoga of physical discipline.

This month marks the 200th anniversary of Charles Baudelaire’s birth, the French poet famous for his descriptions of the flâneur: a man of the crowd, who thrived in the metropolis’ multitude. Following Baudelaire through 19th-century Paris, Matthew Beaumont discovers a parallel archetype — the convalescent hero of modernity — who emerges from the sickbed into city streets with a feverish curiosity.

Gathering over 500 prints, paintings, illustrations, sketches, photographs, doodles, and everything in between, Affinities is a carefully curated journey exploring echoes and connections across more than two millennia of visual culture.

Images from Agostino Ramelli's Diverse and Artificial Machines, which despite their detail obscure as much as they reveal.

John Martin Crawford's translation of a 19th-century work of epic poetry compiled by Elias Lönnrot from Karelian and Finnish oral folklore and mythology.

Toward the end of World War I, as the US peddled hard its Liberty Bonds for the war effort, goldfish dealer Franklin Barrett bred a stars-and-stripes-colored carp: a living, swimming embodiment of patriotism. Laurel Waycott uncovers the story of this “Liberty Bond Fish” and the wider use of animals in propaganda of the time.

In his final work, William Fairfield Warren set out to become a cartographer of the poetic imagination, mapping Milton’s cosmos in Paradise Lost.

Composed in numbered squares, six to a page, these images are colourful and complex odes to marble.