Explore and Download 14,000+ Woodcuts from Antwerp’s Plantin-Moretus Museum Online Archive

in Archives, Books, Design, History, Museums | November 27th, 2024

We appre­ci­ate illu­mi­nat­ed man­u­scripts and his­tor­i­cal books here on Open Cul­ture, adhere though we do to a much more restrained aes­thet­ic style in our own texts. But that’s not to deny the temp­ta­tion to start this para­graph with one of those over­sized ini­tial let­ters that grew ever larg­er and more elab­o­rate over cen­turies past. The online archive of Antwer­p’s Plan­tin-More­tus Muse­um offers plen­ty of wood­cut Ws to choose from, includ­ing designs sober and bare­ly leg­i­ble, as well as Ws that incor­po­rate a sprout­ing plant, some kind of saint, and even a scene of what looks like impend­ing mur­der.

If you’re not in the mar­ket for fan­cy let­ters, you can also browse the Plan­tin-More­tus wood­cut archive through the cat­e­gories of plants, ani­mals, and sci­ences. Some of these illus­tra­tions are tech­ni­cal, and oth­ers more fan­ci­ful; in cer­tain cas­es, the cen­turies have prob­a­bly ren­dered them less real­is­tic-look­ing than once they were.

Not all the more than 14,000 wood­cuts now in the archive would seem to fit neat­ly in one of those cat­e­gories, but if you take a look at par­tic­u­lar entries, you’ll find that the muse­um has also labeled them with more spe­cif­ic tags, like “clas­si­cal antiq­ui­ty,” “map/landscape,” or “aure­ole” (the bright medieval-look­ing halo that marks a fig­ure as holy).

All these wood­cuts, in any case, have been made free to down­load (just click the cloud icon in the upper-right of the win­dow that opens after you click on the image itself) and use as you please. Back in the six­teenth cen­tu­ry, Christophe Plan­tin and Jan More­tus, for whom the Plan­tin-More­tus Muse­um was named, were well-placed to col­lect such things. The Plan­tin-More­tus Muse­um’s web­site describes them as “a rev­o­lu­tion­ary duo.

They were the first print­ers on an indus­tri­al scale — the Steve Jobs and Mark Zucker­berg of their day.” And if these decon­tex­tu­al­ized arti­facts of the print rev­o­lu­tion strike us as a bit strange to us today, just imag­ine how our sur­viv­ing inter­net memes will look four cen­turies hence. Enter the wood­block col­lec­tion here.

via Metafil­ter

Relat­ed con­tent:

Down­load 215,000 Japan­ese Wood­block Prints by Mas­ters Span­ning the Tradition’s 350-Year His­to­ry

800 Illu­mi­nat­ed Medieval Man­u­scripts Are Now Online: Browse & Down­load Them Cour­tesy of the British Library and Bib­lio­thèque Nationale de France

Stephen Fry Takes Us Inside the Sto­ry of Johannes Guten­berg & the First Print­ing Press

Behold the Beau­ti­ful Pages from a Medieval Monk’s Sketch­book: A Win­dow Into How Illu­mi­nat­ed Man­u­scripts Were Made (1494)

Clas­sic Films and Film­mak­ers, Ren­dered in Wood­cut By a Los Ange­les Artist-Cinephile

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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20 Mesmerizing Videos of Japanese Artisans Creating Traditional Handicrafts

in Art, Design | September 3rd, 2024

In Japan­ese “tewaza” means “hand tech­nique” or “hand­craft” and, in this YouTube playlist of 20 short films, var­i­ous arti­sanal tech­niques are explored and demon­strat­ed by Japan­ese mas­ters in the field. For those who are both obsessed with Japan­ese art and watch­ing things get made, these videos are cat­nip. There’s very lit­tle spo­ken, except a few quotes from the mak­ers them­selves, and gen­tle music plays over shots of del­i­cate, intri­cate, and con­fi­dent hand­i­work.

Watch the video up top, a look at how a small group of men forge a Sakai knife. (Yes, we keep expect­ing the music to turn into the Lau­ra Palmer’s Theme too.) No words are nec­es­sary in this exact­ing demon­stra­tion, and just check out the wood-like grain in the met­al.

And the names of these goods denote the towns of origin–Sakai is just out­side Osa­ka, and is one of Japan’s main sea­ports and, yes, known for its knives.

Oth­er videos show the mak­ing of hand­made washi paper from Mino; stun­ning gold leaf pro­duc­tion from Kanaza­wa; paper lantern making from Gifu; dec­o­rat­ed wall­pa­per from Ueno; a Kumano writ­ing brush, and very del­i­cate bam­boo weav­ing from Bep­pu that looks so pre­cise it’s like it’s made by machine, but no, this is all in the eye.

The YouTube chan­nel that has pro­duced these videos, Aoya­ma Square, is a lit­er­al one-stop shop in Tokyo for all the kinds of crafts seen in the videos, and is a mem­ber of the Japan­ese nation­al asso­ci­a­tion that pro­motes and keeps these skills and mini-indus­tries alive. So is this one long ad for a large crafts empo­ri­um? Well, could be. Do we still want to buy some of that beau­ti­ful lac­quer­ware from Echizen? Oh yes, very much so.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Japan­ese Things Are Made in 309 Videos: Bam­boo Tea Whisks, Hina Dolls, Steel Balls & More

The Beau­ti­ful Art of Mak­ing Japan­ese Cal­lig­ra­phy Ink Out of Soot & Glue

Watch a Japan­ese Crafts­man Lov­ing­ly Bring a Tat­tered Old Book Back to Near Mint Con­di­tion

Watch a Japan­ese Arti­san Make a Noh Mask, Cre­at­ing an Aston­ish­ing Char­ac­ter From a Sin­gle Block of Wood

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the FunkZone Pod­cast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

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Buckminster Fuller’s Map of the World: The Innovation That Revolutionized Map Design (1943)

in Design, Maps | August 11th, 2024

In 2017, we brought you news of a world map pur­port­ed­ly more accu­rate than any to date, designed by Japan­ese archi­tect and artist Hajime Narukawa. The map, called the Autha­Graph, updates a cen­turies-old method of turn­ing the globe into a flat sur­face by first con­vert­ing it to a cylin­der. Win­ner of Japan’s Good Design Grand Award, it serves as both a bril­liant design solu­tion and an update to our out­mod­ed con­cep­tions of world geog­ra­phy.

But as some read­ers have point­ed out, the Autha­Graph also seems to draw quite heav­i­ly on an ear­li­er map made by one of the most vision­ary of the­o­rists and design­ers, Buck­min­ster Fuller, who in 1943 applied his Dymax­ion trade­mark to the map you see above, which will like­ly remind you of his most rec­og­niz­able inven­tion, the Geo­des­ic Dome, “house of the future.”

Whether Narukawa has acknowl­edged Fuller as an inspi­ra­tion I can­not say. In any case, 73 years before the Autha­Graph, the Dymax­ion Map achieved a sim­i­lar feat, with sim­i­lar moti­va­tions. As the Buck­min­ster Fuller Insti­tute (BFI) points out, “The Fuller Pro­jec­tion Map is [or was] the only flat map of the entire sur­face of the Earth which reveals our plan­et as one island in the ocean, with­out any visu­al­ly obvi­ous dis­tor­tion of the rel­a­tive shapes and sizes of the land areas, and with­out split­ting any con­ti­nents.”

Fuller pub­lished his map in Life mag­a­zine, as a cor­rec­tive, he said, “for the lay­man, engrossed in belat­ed, war-taught lessons in geog­ra­phy…. The Dymax­ion World map is a means by which he can see the whole world fair­ly at once.” Fuller, notes Kelsey Camp­bell-Dol­laghan at Giz­mo­do, “intend­ed the Dymax­ion World map to serve as a tool for com­mu­ni­ca­tion and col­lab­o­ra­tion between nations.”

Fuller believed, writes BFI, that “giv­en a way to visu­al­ize the whole plan­et with greater accu­ra­cy, we humans will be bet­ter equipped to address chal­lenges as we face our com­mon future aboard Space­ship Earth.” Was he naïve or ahead of his time?

We may have had a good laugh at a recent repli­ca of Fuller’s near­ly undriv­able, “scary as hell,” 1930 Dymax­ion Car, one of his first inven­tions. Many of Fuller’s con­tem­po­raries also found his work bizarre and imprac­ti­cal. Eliz­a­beth Kol­bert at The New York­er sums up the recep­tion he often received for his “schemes,” which “had the hal­lu­ci­na­to­ry qual­i­ty asso­ci­at­ed with sci­ence fic­tion (or men­tal hos­pi­tals).” The com­men­tary seems unfair.

Fuller’s influ­ence on archi­tec­ture, design, and sys­tems the­o­ry has been broad and deep, though many of his designs only res­onat­ed long after their debut. He thought of him­self as an “antic­i­pa­to­ry design sci­en­tist,” rather than an inven­tor, and remarked, “if you want to teach peo­ple a new way of think­ing, don’t both­er try­ing to teach them. Instead, give them a tool, the use of which will lead to new ways of think­ing.” In this sense, we must agree that the Dymax­ion map was an unqual­i­fied suc­cess as an inspi­ra­tion for inno­v­a­tive map design.

In addi­tion to its pos­si­bly indi­rect influ­ence on the Autha­Graph, Fuller’s map has many promi­nent imi­ta­tors and sparked “a rev­o­lu­tion in map­ping,” writes Camp­bell-Dol­laghan. She points us to, among oth­ers, the Cryos­phere, fur­ther up, a Fuller map “arranged based on ice, snow, glac­i­ers, per­mafrost and ice sheets”; to Dubai-based Emi­rates airline’s map show­ing flight routes; and to the “Google­spiel,” an inter­ac­tive Dymax­ion map built by Rehab­stu­dio for Google Devel­op­er Day, 2011.

And, just above, we see the Dymax­ion Woodocean World map by Nicole San­tuc­ci, win­ner of 2013’s DYMAX REDUX, an “open call to cre­ate a new and inspir­ing inter­pre­ta­tion of Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Dymax­ion Map.” You’ll find a hand­ful of oth­er unique sub­mis­sions at BFI, includ­ing the run­ner-up, Clouds Dymax­ion Map, below, by Anne-Gaelle Amiot, an “absolute­ly beau­ti­ful hand-drawn depic­tion of a real­i­ty that is almost always edit­ed from our maps: cloud pat­terns cir­cling above Earth.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Japan­ese Design­ers May Have Cre­at­ed the Most Accu­rate Map of Our World: See the Autha­Graph

A Har­row­ing Test Dri­ve of Buck­min­ster Fuller’s 1933 Dymax­ion Car: Art That Is Scary to Ride

The Life & Times of Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Geo­des­ic Dome: A Doc­u­men­tary

Buck­min­ster Fuller Tells the World “Every­thing He Knows” in a 42-Hour Lec­ture Series (1975)

Bertrand Rus­sell & Buck­min­ster Fuller on Why We Should Work Less, and Live and Learn More

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Buckminster Fuller Tells the World “Everything He Knows” in a 42-Hour Lecture Series (1975)

in Architecture, Design, Science, Technology | July 23rd, 2024

His­to­ry seems to have set­tled Buck­min­ster Fuller’s rep­u­ta­tion as a man ahead of his time. He inspires short, wit­ty pop­u­lar videos like YouTu­ber Joe Scott’s “The Man Who Saw The Future,” and the ongo­ing lega­cy of the Buck­min­ster Fuller Insti­tute (BFI), who note that “Fuller’s ideas and work con­tin­ue to influ­ence new gen­er­a­tions of design­ers, archi­tects, sci­en­tists and artists work­ing to cre­ate a sus­tain­able plan­et.”

Bril­liant futur­ist though he was, Fuller might also be called the man who saw the present and the past—as much as a sin­gle indi­vid­ual could seem­ing­ly hold in their mind at once. He was “a man who is intense­ly inter­est­ed in almost every­thing,” wrote Calvin Tomkins at The New York­er in 1965, the year of Fuller’s 70th birth­day. Fuller was as eager to pass on as much knowl­edge as he could col­lect in his long, pro­duc­tive career, span­ning his ear­ly epipha­nies in the 1920s to his final pub­lic talks in the ear­ly 80s.

“The some­what over­whelm­ing effect of a Fuller mono­logue,” wrote Tomkins, “is well known today in many parts of the world.” His lec­tures leapt from sub­ject to sub­ject, incor­po­rat­ing ancient and mod­ern his­to­ry, math­e­mat­ics, lin­guis­tics, archi­tec­ture, archae­ol­o­gy, phi­los­o­phy, reli­gion, and—in the exam­ple Tomkins gives—“irrefutable data on tides, pre­vail­ing winds,” and “boat design.” His dis­cours­es issue forth in wave after wave of infor­ma­tion.

Fuller could talk at length and with author­i­ty about vir­tu­al­ly anything—especially about him­self and his own work, in his own spe­cial jar­gon of “unique Bucky-isms: spe­cial phras­es, ter­mi­nol­o­gy, unusu­al sen­tence struc­tures, etc.,” writes BFI. He may not always have been par­tic­u­lar­ly hum­ble, yet he spoke and wrote with a lack of prej­u­dice and an open curios­i­ty and that is the oppo­site of arro­gance. Such is the impres­sion we get of Fuller in the series of talks he record­ed ten years after Tomkin’s New York­er por­trait.

Made in Jan­u­ary of 1975, Buck­min­ster Fuller: Every­thing I Know cap­tured Fuller’s “entire life’s work” in 42 hours of “think­ing out loud lec­tures [that exam­ine] in depth all of Fuller’s major inven­tions and dis­cov­er­ies from the 1927 Dymax­ion car, house, car and bath­room, through the Wichi­ta House, geo­des­ic domes, and tenseg­ri­ty struc­tures, as well as the con­tents of Syn­er­get­ics. Auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal in parts, Fuller recounts his own per­son­al his­to­ry in the con­text of the his­to­ry of sci­ence and indus­tri­al­iza­tion.”

He begins, how­ev­er, in his first lec­ture at the top, not with him­self, but with his pri­ma­ry sub­ject of con­cern: “all human­i­ty,” a species that begins always in naked­ness and igno­rance and man­ages to fig­ure it out “entire­ly by tri­al and error,” he says. Fuller mar­vels at the advances of “ear­ly Hin­du and Chi­nese” civilizations—as he had at the Maori in Tomkin’s anec­dote, who “had been among the first peo­ples to dis­cov­er the prin­ci­ples of celes­tial nav­i­ga­tion” and “found a way of sail­ing around the world… at least ten thou­sand years ago.”

The leap from ancient civ­i­liza­tions to “what is called World War I” is “just a lit­tle jump in infor­ma­tion,” he says in his first lec­ture, but when Fuller comes to his own life­time, he shows how many “lit­tle jumps” one human being could wit­ness in a life­time in the 20th cen­tu­ry. “The year I was born Mar­coni invent­ed the wire­less,” says Fuller. “When I was 14 man did get to the North Pole, and when I was 16 he got to the South Pole.”

When Fuller was 7, “the Wright broth­ers sud­den­ly flew,” he says, “and my mem­o­ry is vivid enough of sev­en to remem­ber that for about a year the engi­neer­ing soci­eties were try­ing to prove it was a hoax because it was absolute­ly impos­si­ble for man to do that.” What it showed young Bucky Fuller was that “impos­si­bles are hap­pen­ing.” If Fuller was a vision­ary, he rede­fined the word—as a term for those with an expan­sive, infi­nite­ly curi­ous vision of a pos­si­ble world that already exists all around us.

See Fuller’s com­plete lec­ture series, Every­thing I Know, at the Inter­net Archive, and read edit­ed tran­scripts of his talks at the Buck­min­ster Fuller Insti­tute.

Every­thing I Know will be added to our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Bertrand Rus­sell & Buck­min­ster Fuller on Why We Should Work Less, and Live and Learn More

A Har­row­ing Test Dri­ve of Buck­min­ster Fuller’s 1933 Dymax­ion Car: Art That Is Scary to Ride

The Life & Times of Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Geo­des­ic Dome: A Doc­u­men­tary

Buck­min­ster Fuller Doc­u­ment­ed His Life Every 15 Min­utes, from 1920 Until 1983

Buck­min­ster Fuller, Isaac Asi­mov & Oth­er Futur­ists Make Pre­dic­tions About the 21st Cen­tu­ry in 1967: What They Got Right & Wrong

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Free: Download the The Anarchist’s Tool Chest, The Anarchist’s Design Book, The Anarchist’s Workbench & Other Woodworking Texts

in Books, Design | April 17th, 2024

For Christo­pher Schwarz, Amer­i­can anar­chism isn’t “about bombs and leather jack­ets; it’s about being an inde­pen­dent design­er.” It’s about work­ing out­side “mas­sive and dehu­man­iz­ing insti­tu­tions” (like cor­po­ra­tions) and design­ing beau­ti­ful objects that last. He writes: “As a design­er of books, tools and fur­ni­ture, I have zero desire to make things that are intend­ed from the get-go to fall apart.” Based in Cov­ing­ton, Ken­tucky, Schwarz runs a small wood­work­ing busi­ness where he hand­crafts beau­ti­ful tables, chairs and oth­er pieces of fur­ni­ture. He also runs Lost Art Press, which pub­lish­es books like The Anarchist’s Tool Chest, The Anarchist’s Design Book, The Anarchist’s Work­bench, and oth­er titles.

His “Anar­chist” series of books “rep­re­sent a 10-year effort to make wood­work­ing more acces­si­ble, afford­able and eth­i­cal – and less com­mer­cial.” Typ­i­cal­ly the print edi­tions run $30-$54. But, to the delight of many fel­low wood­work­ers, Schwarz has made sev­er­al edi­tions avail­able as free dig­i­tal down­loads. This includes (as of this week) The Anarchist’s Tool Chest, which “shows you how you can build fur­ni­ture with only a small kit of high-qual­i­ty tools. The first half of the book explains in detail how to choose the right tools… The sec­ond half of the book shows you how to build a tra­di­tion­al tool chest to hold these tools.” To find a com­plete list of books avail­able as free down­loads, see the list below.

 

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The Fictional Brand Archives: Explore a Growing Collection of Iconic But Fake Brands Found in Movies & TV

in Design, Film, Television | April 11th, 2024

Los Pol­los Her­manos, Madri­gal Elec­tro­mo­tive, Mesa Verde Bank and Trust, Davis & Main: Attor­neys at Law—all of these brands come from the Break­ing Bad/Bet­ter Call Saul uni­verse. They also appear in the Fic­tion­al Brands Archive, a web­site ded­i­cat­ed to “fic­tion­al brands found in films, series and video games.” Tak­ing the brands seri­ous­ly as brands, the site draws on research from a new book writ­ten by Loren­zo Berni­ni enti­tled Fic­tion­al Brand Design. And, with its many entries, the site pro­vides a “com­pre­hen­sive view of each fic­tion­al brand, fram­ing them in their own fic­tion­al con­text and doc­u­ment­ing their use and exe­cu­tion in source work.”

Oth­er notable brands include Acme (Looney Tunes), ATN News (Suc­ces­sion), Dun­der Mif­flin (The Office), Fed­er­al Motor Cor­po­ra­tion (Fight Club), both Grand Budapest Hotel and Mendl’s (Grand Budapest Hotel), and Nakato­mi Cor­po­ra­tion (Die Hard). Enter the Fic­tion­al Brands Archive here.

via Messy­Nessy

Relat­ed Con­tent 

A Free Dig­i­tal Archive of Graph­ic Design: A Curat­ed Col­lec­tion of Design Trea­sures from the Inter­net Archive

The Let­ter­form Archive Launch­es a New Online Archive of Graph­ic Design, Fea­tur­ing 9,000 Hi-Fi Images

Down­load 2,000 Mag­nif­i­cent Turn-of-the-Cen­tu­ry Art Posters, Cour­tesy of the New York Pub­lic Library

40 Years of Saul Bass’ Ground­break­ing Title Sequences in One Com­pi­la­tion

 

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Goethe’s Theory of Colors: The 1810 Treatise That Inspired Kandinsky & Early Abstract Painting

in Art, Design | April 1st, 2024

I doubt I need to list for you the many titles of the 18th cen­tu­ry Ger­man savant and poly­math Johann Wolf­gang von Goethe, but allow me to add one or two that were new to me, at least: col­or the­o­rist (or phe­nom­e­nol­o­gist of col­or) and prog­en­i­tor of abstract expres­sion­ism. As a fas­ci­nat­ing Book­tryst post informs us, Goethe’s book on col­or, Zur Far­ben­lehre (The­o­ry of Col­ors), writ­ten in 1810, dis­put­ed the New­ton­ian view of the sub­ject and for­mu­lat­ed a psy­cho­log­i­cal and philo­soph­i­cal account of the way we actu­al­ly expe­ri­ence col­or as a phe­nom­e­non. In his account, Goethe describes how he came by his views:

Along with the rest of the world, I was con­vinced that all the col­ors are con­tained in the light; no one had ever told me any­thing dif­fer­ent, and I had nev­er found the least cause to doubt it, because I had no fur­ther inter­est in the sub­ject.

But how I was aston­ished, as I looked at a white wall through the prism, that it stayed white! That only where it came upon some dark­ened area, it showed some col­or, then at last, around the win­dow sill all the col­ors shone… It did­n’t take long before I knew here was some­thing sig­nif­i­cant about col­or to be brought forth, and I spoke as through an instinct out loud, that the New­ton­ian teach­ings were false.

Schopen­hauer would lat­er write that “[Goethe] deliv­ered in full mea­sure what was promised by the title of his excel­lent work: data toward a the­o­ry of colour. They are impor­tant, com­plete, and sig­nif­i­cant data, rich mate­r­i­al for a future the­o­ry of colour.” It was a the­o­ry, Schopen­hauer admits, that does not “[fur­nish] us with a real expla­na­tion of the essen­tial nature of colour, but real­ly pos­tu­lates it as a phe­nom­e­non, and mere­ly tells us how it orig­i­nates, not what it is.”

Anoth­er lat­er philo­soph­i­cal inter­preter of Goethe, Lud­wig Wittgen­stein—a thinker great­ly inter­est­ed in visu­al perception—also saw Goethe’s work as oper­at­ing very dif­fer­ent­ly than New­ton’s optics—not as a sci­en­tif­ic the­o­ry but rather as an intu­itive schema. Wittgen­stein remarked that Goethe’s work “is real­ly not a the­o­ry at all. Noth­ing can be pre­dict­ed by means of it. It is, rather, a vague schemat­ic out­line, of the sort we find in [William] James’s psy­chol­o­gy. There is no exper­i­men­tum cru­cis for Goethe’s the­o­ry of colour.”

Yet a third lat­er Ger­man genius, Wern­er Heisen­berg, com­ment­ed on the influ­ence of Zur Far­ben­lehre, writ­ing that “Goethe’s colour the­o­ry has in many ways borne fruit in art, phys­i­ol­o­gy and aes­thet­ics. But vic­to­ry, and hence influ­ence on the research of the fol­low­ing cen­tu­ry, has been New­ton’s.”

 

I’m not fit to eval­u­ate the rel­a­tive mer­its of Goethe’s the­o­ry, or lack there­of, ver­sus New­ton’s rig­or­ous work on optics. Whole books have been writ­ten on the sub­ject. But what­ev­er his inten­tions, Goethe’s work has been well-received as a psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly accu­rate account that has also, through his text and many illus­tra­tions you see here, had sig­nif­i­cant influ­ence on twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry painters also great­ly con­cerned with the psy­chol­o­gy of col­or, most notably Wass­i­ly Kandin­sky, who pro­duced his own “schemat­ic out­line” of the psy­cho­log­i­cal effects of col­or titled Con­cern­ing the Spir­i­tu­al in Art, a clas­sic of mod­ernist aes­thet­ic the­o­ry. As is usu­al­ly the case with Goethe, the influ­ence of this sin­gle work is wider and deep­er than he prob­a­bly ever fore­saw.

You can find an afford­able ver­sion of Goethe’s The­o­ry of Col­ors on Ama­zon. Or find scans of the book at Archive.org.

Note: This post orig­i­nal­ly appeared on our site in 2013. We have updat­ed the post with new images and links.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Book of Colour Con­cepts: A New 800-Page Cel­e­bra­tion of Col­or The­o­ry, Includ­ing Works by New­ton, Goethe, and Hilma af Klint

A 900-Page Pre-Pan­tone Guide to Col­or from 1692: A Com­plete Dig­i­tal Scan

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Goethe, Germany’s “Renais­sance Man”

Har­ry Clarke’s 1926 Illus­tra­tions of Goethe’s Faust: Art That Inspired the Psy­che­del­ic 60s

Watch Goethe’s Haunt­ing Poem, “Der Erlkönig,” Pre­sent­ed in an Art­ful Sand Ani­ma­tion

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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180,000 Years of Religion Charted on a “Histomap” in 1943

in Design, History, Religion | March 20th, 2024

For many, even most of us mod­erns, the cen­tral reli­gious choice is a sim­ple one: adhere to the belief sys­tem in which you grew up, or stop adher­ing to it. But if you sur­vey the vari­ety of reli­gions in the world, the sit­u­a­tion no longer seems quite so bina­ry; if you then add the vari­ety of reli­gions that have exist­ed through­out human his­to­ry, it starts look­ing down­right kalei­do­scop­ic. Or rather, it looks some­thing like the faint­ly psy­che­del­ic but also infor­ma­tion-rich His­tom­ap of Reli­gion above, cre­at­ed in 1943 by chemist John B. Sparks, whom we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture for his orig­i­nal His­tom­ap depict­ing 4,000 Years of World His­to­ry and his sub­se­quent His­tom­ap of Evo­lu­tion.

The Use­fulCharts video below explains Sparks’ His­tom­ap of Reli­gion in detail, but it also cites his His­tom­ap of Evo­lu­tion, an exam­ple of how his world­view fails to align with cur­rent per­cep­tions of these sub­jects. Even the new­er His­tom­ap of Reli­gion is by now more than 80 years old, dur­ing which time schol­ar­ship in reli­gion and relat­ed fields has made cer­tain dis­cov­er­ies and clar­i­fi­ca­tions that nec­es­sar­i­ly go unre­flect­ed in Sparks’ work. But if you bear this in mind while look­ing at the His­tom­ap of Reli­gion, you can still gain a new and use­ful per­spec­tive on how the beliefs that mankind has held high­est have changed and inter­min­gled over the mil­len­nia.

The chart begins in pre­his­to­ry, divid­ing the then-extant faiths into the cat­e­gories “mag­ic and fetishism,” “tabu and totemism,” “ances­tor wor­ship,” “trib­al gods and divine kings,” “pro­pi­ti­a­tion of nature spir­its,” and “fer­til­i­ty cults.” Though Sparks’ infor­ma­tion may on the whole be “based on the­o­ries about the ori­gins of reli­gion which have now been either reject­ed or at least seri­ous­ly revised,” explains Use­fulCharts cre­ator Matt Bak­er, “the gen­er­al ideas expressed by these six types are still some­what valid.” The expan­sion and con­trac­tion of adher­ence to these types of ear­ly reli­gion through time are reflect­ed by changes in the width of the col­ored columns that rep­re­sent them. Fol­low these columns down­ward through his­to­ry, and new, more famil­iar reli­gions emerge: Tao­ism, Judaism, Hin­duism, Bud­dhism, Chris­tian­i­ty both Catholic and Protes­tant.

There­after come oth­er move­ments and fig­ures per­haps not imme­di­ate­ly rec­og­niz­able as reli­gious in nature: “human­ism,” for exam­ple, whose rep­re­sen­ta­tives include Shake­speare and Rousseau. Lat­er, the ideas of Russ­ian intel­lec­tu­als Vis­sar­i­on Belin­sky and Alexan­der Herzen branch off to become, after about a cen­tu­ry, the “cor­rupt phi­los­o­phy” of com­mu­nism, with its “God-less pro­pa­gan­da” sup­port­ing a “police state aimed at world dom­i­na­tion.” Bak­er objects that, if Sparks counts com­mu­nism as a reli­gion, then sure­ly he should count cap­i­tal­ism as a reli­gion as well. This is a fair-enough point, though behold this dense chart of “cults, faiths, and eth­i­cal philoso­phies” long enough, and you’ll start to won­der if every­thing human­i­ty has ever done isn’t, in some sense, ulti­mate­ly reli­gious in nature.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Ani­mat­ed Map Shows How the Five Major Reli­gions Spread Across the World (3000 BC — 2000 AD)

The Tree of Lan­guages Illus­trat­ed in a Big, Beau­ti­ful Info­graph­ic

Joseph Priest­ley Visu­al­izes His­to­ry & Great His­tor­i­cal Fig­ures with Two of the Most Influ­en­tial Info­graph­ics Ever (1769)

4000 Years of His­to­ry Dis­played in a 5‑Foot-Long “His­tom­ap” (Ear­ly Info­graph­ic) From 1931

10 Mil­lion Years of Evo­lu­tion Visu­al­ized in an Ele­gant, 5‑Foot Long Info­graph­ic from 1931

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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