Circles - Mandalas - Radial Symmetry XI (Heavenly Bodies)

behold this fool who, in the month of June,
having of certain stars and planets heard,
rose very slowly in a tight balloon
until the smallening world became absurd

E. E. Cummings

Europa

Animals in Art - Early Photographs

I stumbled across this mysterious daguerreotype of a bird from 1851.
It is one of the first photographic images taken of an animal...

Joseph Cornell - Rorschach Drawings

The world is a harmless enigma made terrible by our own mad attempt
to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth

Umberto Eco



"They Say the Owl is a Baker's Daughter" Ophelia, 1971

Sunday Favorites - The Pulse of Nature

In short I am convinced it is a most
ridiculous thing to go round the world,
when by staying quietly, the world
will go round with you

Charles Darwin



Yunfun Tan

19th Century Stereographs

Form is henceforth divorced from matter. In fact,
matter as a visible object is of no great use any longer, ...

... except as the mould on which form is shaped. Give us a few negatives of a thing worth seeing, taken from different points of view, and that is all we want of it. Pull it down or burn it up, if you please. We must, perhaps, sacrifice some luxury in the loss of color; but form and light and shade are the great things, and even color can be added, and perhaps by and by may be got direct from Nature.
source

Alchemical manuscripts - Cabala

When you have water, that is Mercury of the Air,
that is of the Stone and Air of Fire, that is Spirit
of Mercury and fire that is Mercury of the Earth,
that is of Luna, then you shall have the Art fully.

Aristotle

Early 20th Century Illustrations from Japanese Children's Books

I imagine that yes is the only living thing

E. E. Cummings

Marvels of Creatures and Strange Things Existing

Kitab Aja'ib al-makhluqat wa Gharaib al-Mawjudat

literally "The Wonders of Creation and the Curiosities of Existence", or

Marvels of Creatures and Strange Things Existing

Merchant from Isfahan Flying


Kitab Aja'ib al-makhluqat wa Gharaib al-Mawjudat, literally "The Wonders of Creation," compiled in the middle 1200s in what is now Iran or Iraq. The vibrantly illustrated work is considered one of the most important natural history texts of the medieval Islamic world.

Tsuki Hyakushi - 100 Aspects of the Moon

Whore and monk, we sleep
under one roof together,
moon in a field of clover

Bashu






A huge thank you to all my followers and subscribers.
You are amazing and I couldn't do this without you!

Moon

you'll be beautiful in my manner

John Adams Whipple, View of the Moon, Feb 26, 1852 (Daguerreotype )

__________________________


The Moon’s Favors

Meanwhile, in the expansiveness of her joy,
the Moon filled all of the room like a phosphoric atmosphere,
like a luminous poison; and all of that living light thought and said:
“You will be eternally subject to the influence of my kiss.
You will be beautiful in my manner.

You will love what I love and who loves me:
water, the clouds, silence, and the night; the immense, green sea;
formless and multiform water; the place where you will not be;
the lover you will not know; monstrous flowers;
perfumes that make you delirious; cats who swoon on pianos,
and who moan like women, with a hoarse, gentle voice!

Charles Baudelaire

__________________________

Japanese animal masks

Children in the industrialized world are surrounded by animal
imagery: toys, cartoons, pictures, ...

... decorations of every sort. No other source of imagery can begin to compete with that of animals. The apparently spontaneous interest that children have in animals might lead one to suppose that this has always been the case…. Yet it was not until the nineteenth century that reproductions of animals became a regular part of the décor of middle class childhoods
John Berger, Why Look at Animals, 1980

Snake-Calligraphy

No sooner had the Snake beheld this reverend figure, than the King began to speak, and asked: "Whence comest thou?" "From the chasms where the gold dwells," said the Snake. "What is grander than gold?" inquired the King. "Light," replied the Snake. "What is more refreshing than light?" said he. "Speech," answered she.

Shiohi no tsuto - Gifts of the ebb tide

Shiohi no tsuto (Gifts of the ebb tide)
The shell book. (1789)

Painted by Kitagawa Utamaro (?-1806),
edited by Akera Kanko (1738-98)

A colored picture book of Kyoka (satirical poems) about shell collecting. 

Detail

The Hours of Catherine of Cleves

An artist whose name has been lost to time painted the gold-studded illuminations around 1440 in a book of prayers for Catherine of Cleves, a Dutch countess. Her court commissioned the volume of hours, or illustrated daily devotions, around the time she separated from her spendthrift husband, Arnold of Egmond, and began a futile 30-year effort to unseat him. Catherine’s illustrator is most famous for weirdly fanciful borders; he surrounded Latin text blocks with bee swarms, devils, birdcages, pearls, pea pods, burst-open mussels and fish eating one another’s tails. (source)

Detail

Moon People

Pictures from the times when all the unknown places of the earth and the heavens still were crowded with fabulous creatures and imaginary landscapes

Scoperte fatte nella luna Sigr. Herschell, [1836]

While browsing some archives with historic scientific images I  found the picture above and below are some examples from this wonderful "portfolio of hand-tinted lithographs purports to illustrate the "discovery of life on the moon." In 1836, Richard E. Locke, writing for the New York Sun, claimed that the noted British astronomer Sir William Herschel had discovered life on the moon. Flora and fauna included bat-men, moon maidens (with luna-moth wings), moon bison, and other extravagant life forms. Locke proposed an expedition to the moon using a ship supported by hydrogen balloons."

Natural History Illustrations - Some Favorites

Maria Sibylla Merian,  Surinam Lizard