Ramage

Small...

...but perfectly-formed - the lumen art pool on Flickr:

image by SEngstrom

The Fantastic in Art and Fiction

Satan, detail from an illustration from the 1688 edition of Milton's Paradise Lost.

Gargoyle, detail from one of Willy Pogàny's illustrations to T. W. Rolleston's The Tale of Lohengrin, New York, 1910.

Ghoulish demon, detail from the frontispiece to E.-H. Langlois' pioneering study of the danse macabre theme, Essai Historique, Philosophique et Pittoresque sur les Danses des Morts, published in 1852. The illustration may be by his sister, Hyacinthe Langlois.

Detail from 'La Danse du Sabbat', one of the illustrations in P. Christian's Histoire de la Magie, Paris, 1884.

Click on the detail to see the full image on its original page. From The Fantastic in Art and Fiction, a treasury of mankind's most lurid imaginings, and one of the digital collections of Cornell University Library.

Kunst! Kommerz! Visionen!

poster by Wilhelm Deffke, 1912.

poster by Fritz Heubner, 1920.

poster by Dore Corty, (for a firm manufacturing wire-mesh), 1920.

poster by Oskar Hadank, 1930.

From the online version of "Kunst! Kommerz! Visionen!" , an exhibition of German posters from the years 1888-1933, held in 1992 at the Deutsches Historisches Museum.

Kino

Who is this masked man, riding out of the mists on his motorcycle?

(poster by Margit Doppler for "Goliath Armstrong: the Hercules of the Black Mountains", 1927?)

Can he save our heroine from the scary green snake and the devilish villain with the staring yellow eyes??

(poster by Theo Matejko for "Wehrlose Opfer", 1919).

Or our other heroine from the hyenas of lust, whoever they may be???

(unknown artist, poster for "Weg der zur Verdammnis führt", 1919).

And what role does the mysterious Funkzauber have in all this????

(poster by Conrad Neubauer for "Funkzauber, 1927).

Or the even more mysterious man with the monocle?????

(poster by Theo Matejko for "Treff 7", 1920?).

Hang on to your seats, folks.... (Movie posters from a huge collection at the Austrian National Library).

Totentanz (reprise)

The Europäische Totentanz Vereinigung has extensive galleries of Totentanz-related imagery in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, including this hot sextet from Bleibach (attributed to Johann Jakob Winter, 1723):

Rhinomania

I learn, via A. G. Van der Steur , a Dutch antiquarian, that Death's rhino had a name! She was called Clara, and she was the fifth rhino to reach Europe alive, arriving on the a vessel captained by one Douwe Mout van der Meer, on July 22nd, 1741. Van der Meer soon began to exhibit Clara in his home town of Leiden, and elsewhere in the Netherlands, and eventually developed a full-scale Rhino Grand Tour of Europe. Albinus and his artist Jan Wandelaar saw Clara in Amsterdam, and adopted her, the first rhino in Western art to be drawn from the life, as an emblem for their atlas of the living human body. For sixteen years, until she died at the age of 21, Clara was the centre of a European rhinoceros-craze, attracting the attention of many thousands of people, including such notables as Casanova, and the great naturalist Buffon - here she is, as depicted in Buffon's Histoire Naturelle :

(image found at the George Glazer Gallery).

Perhaps the most famous image of her, though, is Pietro Longhi's, of 1751:

(image found at the Web Galley of Art, via Art 4 2Day)

I particularly like Longhi's attention to the animal's dung, I suupose as a way of guaranteeing her earthy reality.

Boy's toys

From the wonderful, if slightly odd, Young Man's Book of Amusement of 1854:

From Lateral Science, where a larger version is also available for your delectation; you may also learn how to illuminate eggs (strange, isn't it, how so few people wish to do this these days?), and how to obtain exquisite skeletons of small animals, for those frequent occasions when nothing else will do.

Meanwhile, back in the 18th century, chaps were quite content to walk around on stilts, play skittles, or attempt to shoot each other down off swings with pea-shooters:

From the 1781 Nuremberg edition of Orbis Sensualium Pictus, at the Virtual Museum of Education Iconics. 8 out of 10, I think.

Stars of (and in) vintage book illustration

John Bauer (1882-1918) - 'Horseman at dawn'.

This, like the two following images, are taken from the illustrators gallery at Bud Plant's Illustrated Books . There's a museum dedicated to this talented artist -who died tragically, aged only 35 - in his home town of Jönköping in Sweden, with an online gallery.

Kay Nielsen (1886-1957), a detail from one of the illustrations for Gudrun Thorne-Thomsen's Nordic folk-tale collection, "East of the Sun and West of the Moon" (1914).

Sidney Sime (1867-1941), frontispiece for the 1924 limited edition of Lord Dunsany's "The King of Elfland's Daughter".

How not to get your homework done...

From a little gallery of Japanese Education Iconography, from The Virtual Museum of Education Iconics at the Univesity of Minnesota:

Plenty of other good stuff here too. I shall make further examinations, and award marks out of 10.

Electroluminescent skeletons, and other (morning) glories...

Electroluminescent products, from elumin8. Via icon magazine.

“Electroluminescent lights are paper-thin, low-energy, and flexible and can be screen-printed onto large-scale surfaces. Emitting a pale blue glow, they have the potential to transform advertising billboards into flashing, eye-catching animations, to create low-level lighting in aircraft and car interiors…” Or how about this: “a reactive tablecloth that lights up beneath objects placed on it”. Or this:

(“Digital Dawn”, a window-blind designed by Rachel Wingfield – from loop.ph)

Then there’s...

“The ovate, red-coloured central capsule exhibits in the lower half the striate podoconus, in the upper half four oil-globules, and at the left the kidney-shaped nucleus. Numerous "yellow cells" or xanthellae are scattered in the calymma, which contains brown pigment around the porochora. Numerous pseudopodia radiate from the supporting spines of the sagittal ring.”

A description of a species of Radiolaria, from Die Radiolarien, 1862, and Report on the Radiolaria collected by H.M.S. Challenger, 1887, by Ernst Haeckel. Satellites, radio transmitters, shuttlecocks....

As Haeckel wrote: “The skeleton of the Radiolaria is developed in such exceedingly manifold and various shapes, and exhibits at the same time such wonderful regularity and delicacy in its adjustments, that in both these respects the present group of Protista excels all other classes of the organic world. ... it shows the potentiality of the highest complexity to which the process of skeleton formation can be brought by a single cell.” Via Kurt Stueber’s Online Library.

Also, epiphytes in Brazil (from Die epiphytische Vegetation Amerikas. (1888), by Andreas Franz Wilhelm Schimper):

German beetles (from Fauna Germanica (1908), by Edmund Reitter):

(figs. 1,2 and 3 are called inquisitor, sycophanta, and investigator, respectively)

morning glories (from Asagao sanjuu rokka sen - 36 ausgewählte Asagao (Winden)-Blüten, (1854)):

and other glorious Japanese flora (from Flora Japonica, Sectio Prima, (1870), by Philipp Franz von Siebold and Joseph Gerhard Zuccarini):

Again, all the above are taken from Kurt Stueber’s Online Library. I'm very grateful to Herr Stueber for all the work that must have gone into creating this very large site; the text scans are mainly in German, and there’s no way of searching it to find where the images are, but it’s very much worth your persistence.

Bhikku led me here.