How Leonardo da Vinci Made His Magnificent Drawings Using Only a Metal Stylus, Pen & Ink, and Chalk

in Art, History | March 25th, 2021

The modern artist has what can seem like an unlimited range of materials from which to choose, a variety completely unknown to great Renaissance masters like Leonardo da Vinci. Few, if any, can say, however, that they have anything like the raw talent, ingenuity, and discipline that drove Leonardo to draw incessantly, constantly honing his techniques and exploiting every use of the tools and techniques available to him.

What were those tools and techniques? Conservator Alan Donnithorne demonstrates Leonardo’s materials in the video above, with examples from the holdings of the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle. Leonardo “drew incessantly,” the Royal Collection Trust writes, “to devise his artistic projects, to explore the natural world, and to record the workings of his imagination.” He used metalpoint, a method of drawing on coated paper with a metal stylus; pen and ink, with pens made from a goose wing feather; and, after the 1490s, red and black chalks.

Leonardo produced thousands of drawings during his lifetime“many of them of extreme beauty and complexity,” says Donnithorne, “and it’s incredible to think that he produced them using these very simple ingredients.”

The Royal Collection owns around 550 of these drawings, “together as a group since the artist’s death in 1519,” when he bequeathed them to his student, Francesco Melzi. These works “provide unparalleled insight,” the Collection writes, “into the workings of Leonardo’s mind and reflect the full range of his interests, including painting, sculpture, architecture, anatomy, engineering, cartography, geology, and botany.”

The restlessness of Leonardo’s mind and hand also reflect the need to move quickly from project to project as he pursued some commissions and abandoned others. “Across all these themes,” however, Christopher Baker, director of European and Scottish Art and Portraiture at the National Galleries of Scotland, sees “a ravishing range of techniques and materials…. The precision required by metalpoint proved especially appropriate for some of his most incisive human or animal observations, while iron gall ink and red and black chalks allowed an exploratory freedom fitting for compositional trials, fictive works or capturing movement.”

The artist’s “prodigious skills” are evident among his many shifts in style and subject and we see even in utilitarian illustrations how “he overturned so many conventions and sometimes mixed his media to wonderful effect.” Leonardo’s choice of media was hardly expansive compared to the dizzyingly colorful aisles that greet the budding artist at art supply stores today. But what he could do with a stylus, goose-quill pen, and chalk has never been equalled. Learn more about how he used his materials in Donnithorne’s book, Leonardo da Vinci: A Closer Look, published on the 500th anniversary celebrations of Leonardo’s death.

via Core77

Leonardo da Vinci’s Elegant Studies of the Human Heart Were 500 Years Ahead of Their Time

Leonardo da Vinci’s Earliest Notebooks Now Digitized and Made Free Online: Explore His Ingenious Drawings, Diagrams, Mirror Writing & More

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Irish Aristocratic Woman Who Almost Assassinated Mussolini in 1926: An Introduction to Violet Gibson

in History | March 24th, 2021

By 1926, Benito Mussolini had become one of Europe’s most popular leaders after consolidating power through violence, turning Italy into a police state, and providing a model for budding dictator Adolf Hitler. Mussolini’s received positive recognition from the press, celebrities, and governments around the world, as well as the imprimatur of the Roman Catholic church. None of this mattered to onetime Irish socialite and fervent Catholic convert Violet Gibson. She knew he must be stopped, and she almost did it, getting close enough to graze his nose with a bullet in 1926 before she was taken into custody, handed over to British authorities, and “consigned to an asylum” for the next 29 years, “her story… all but forgotten,” Nora McGreevy writes at Smithsonian.

Gibson grew up between Dublin and London, hailing “from a wealthy family headed by her father, Lord Ashbourne, a senior judicial figure in Ireland.” She “served as a debutante in the court of Queen Victoria” and was raised among European aristocracy. A sickly child, she also suffered from mental health issues and was diagnosed with “hysteria.” Perhaps the most defining moment in Gibson’s life — before her assassination attempt on the Italian fascist dictator — came when she converted to Catholicism in 1902. It was an event, argues Siobhan Lynam in the 2014 RTÉ radio documentary below, that would lead to “a sort mutilation” in her relationship with her family. “There’s a sort of severing that happens,” says Frances Stonor Saunders, author of The Woman Who Shot Mussolini.

Throughout the 1920s, Gibson suffered attacks of mental illness and was hospitalized after her brother’s death, “overwhelmed by grief and loss and the sheer exhaustion of physical illness.” She also followed current events closely, and she was appalled by Mussolini’s rise to power. “Italy for her,” Stonor Saunders says, “is a place of… idealized values.” Gibson traveled to Italy in 1925 with a revolver, which she first used to shoot herself in the chest. She survived, then formed a plan to kill Mussolini instead, despairing of the world he was bringing about. She was able to get close to him, perhaps, because she fit the caricature to which she has been reduced as a historical footnote.

“This is a woman whom history has stripped of all her dignity,” says Stonor Saunders. “She exists as a series of really dreadful cliches in a number of texts, books that refuse her any kind of humanity. She’s just a stereotype of crazy Irish spinster.” As Lynam’s documentary, Stonor Saunders’ book, and a new documentary film currently screening at film festivals (see trailer at then top) show, there was much more to Violet Gibson; she was a committed Catholic and anti-fascist and she nearly changed history in the most successful of the four attempts on Mussolini’s life. She was fifty years old at the time and she lived another 30 years in an institution, dying in 1956. She became known among the staff as the delusional old woman who believed she’d tried to kill Il Duce. No one remembered the event, her own recollections had been silenced, and she had virtually faded from the historical record.

Now, in addition to the media attention, attempts to erect a plaque in Dublin in Gibson’s honor are continuing apace. But why was she ignored for so long? Dublin city councillor Mannix Flynn tells the BBC that while women are rarely given their due for their role in historical events, “for some strange reasons, Violet Gibson became some sort of an embarrassment, she got shunned, they tried to say she was insane to hide the shame.” Gibson’s family had a hand in this, immediately using their power to bargain for her release from Italy and her commitment in Britain. But she also became an embarrassment to the powers in Britain and the world at large who had happily embraced a fascist dictator.

via The Smithsonian

The Story of Fascism: Rick Steves’ Documentary Helps Us Learn from the Hard Lessons of the 20th Century

Umberto Eco Makes a List of the 14 Common Features of Fascism

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Growth of London, from the Romans to the 21st Century, Visualized in a Time-Lapse Animated Map

in History, Maps | March 23rd, 2021

From a port settlement on the banks of the Thames that the Romans called Londinium came a thriving city of “roughly 100,000 people” in Shakespeare’s time, “a cross-section of early modern English culture,” the British Library notes, including “royalty, nobility, merchants, artisans, laborers, actors, beggars, thieves, and spies, as well as refugees from political and religious persecution on the continent.” The city thrived economically and merchants from the known world passed through its ports. “As a result, Londoners would hear a variety of accents and languages as they strolled about the city — a chorus of voices from across Europe and from all walks of life.”

The chorus of voices became a cacophony for many Londoners in the following century who resurrected a pastoral ideal and/or retired to the countryside in the 1600s. The city swelled to a population of around half a million. “It is also a period during which a high proportion of London’s inhabitants were migrants,” writes the Proceedings of the Old Bailey. “It was only by maintaining this constant influx that the capital could possibly maintain its population growth,” slow as it was. “London’s population in this period was also characterized by its diversity,” and by stagnation as plague and fire devastated the city throughout the century.

The city’s cosmopolitan communities grew as England became a colonial world power. Neoclassical art and architecture beautified the city’s new wealth, and along with wealth came poverty, overcrowding, immiseration, and crime. “Here malice, rapine, accident, conspire; and now a rabble, now a fire,” wrote Samuel Johnson in “London,” (1738), a poem written in imitation of Juvenal’s satire on Imperial Rome. In his “London” over half a century later, William Blake saw “marks of weakness, marks of woe” on every face he met in the city — beginning a protest tradition that reached its zenith during the massive population growth in Dickens’ time, and found new voice in glam, punk, grime, etc.

People have come from all over the world to make their home in London for centuries. Each wave of migrants has had to navigate the city’s class hierarchies — through plagues, fires, the Blitz, strikes, riots, protests, more fires, Brexit.… London has burned, “London is drowning,” sang Joe Strummer. But London remains, a megacity of nearly 9 million. In the video above, you can see the city’s growth mapped over a period of 2,000 years, from the Romans to the Saxons; from Tudor to Stuart, early and late Georgian, early and late Victorian, and into the wartorn 20th century.

Fly Through 17th-Century London’s Gritty Streets with Prize-Winning Animations

The Oldest Known Footage of London (1890–1920) Features the City’s Great Landmarks

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

How Edward Munch Signaled His Bohemian Rebellion with Cigarettes (1895): A Video Essay

in Art, History | March 23rd, 2021

When we think of Edvard Munch, we think of The Scream. Though not explicitly a self-portrait, that iconic 1893 canvas does, to anyone who’s read up on the painter’s life, look like a plausible expression of his troubled internal state. But “Self-Portrait with Cigarette made two years later, though less jarring, is just as concerned with Munch’s personal psychology and the dark underside of his identity as The Scream is.” So argues Evan Puschak, better known as the Nerdwriter, in his video essay “Edvard Munch: What A Cigarette Means.” Through the artist’s smoke of choice, it seems, we can approach and understand the different time in which he lived.

“At the end of the 19th century,” Puschak explains, “the cigarette existed at the center of a lot of different cultural forces.” In fact it hadn’t quite caught on, having yet to overcome its lower-class image compared to cigars and pipes. But as with so much that eventually goes mainstream, the cigarette was first widely adopted by bohemians.

Among them Munch and his contemporaries “found their alternative to the suffocating middle-class value system. They traded in drawing rooms for late-night cafés, dinner parties for nightclubs, and cigars for cigarettes.” Puschak pulls up a painting by Munch’s mentor Christian Krohg showing a 21-year-old Munch “lighting up with his friends and fellow painters in his studio.”

Even as he inhabited it, Munch himself also captured this floating world in his art. In one of his etchings, “smoke snakes and fills up the atmosphere of a café, where bohemian intellectuals of both genders drink and debate art and ideas.” To the social reformers of late 19th-century Norway such scenes were anathema, and “the cigarette was symptomatic of society’s degeneration.” These figures thought little more of Munch’s art, whether the work in question was a relatively naturalistic image like Self-Portrait with Cigarette or a violently expressionist one like The Scream. Regarded today as examples of high, refined culture, his paintings have in some sense lost their edge; but then so has the cigarette, a onetime liberating symbol of social and artistic revolution now reduced to a squalid public-health hazard.

The Life & Work of Edvard Munch, Explored by Patti Smith and Charlotte Gainsbourg

Edvard Munch’s Famous Painting The Scream Animated to the Sound of Pink Floyd’s Primal Music

Edvard Munch’s The Scream Animated to the Psychedelic Sounds of Pink Floyd: The Winter Version

30,000 Works of Art by Edvard Munch & Other Artists Put Online by Norway’s National Museum of Art

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.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Researchers Develop a Digital Model of the 2,200-Year-Old Antikythera Mechanism, “the World’s First Computer”

in Astronomy, History, Science | March 18th, 2021

What’s the world’s oldest computer? If you answered the 5‑ton, room-sized IBM Mark I, it’s a good guess, but you’d be off by a couple thousand years or so. The first known computer may have been a handheld device, a little larger than the average tablet. It was also hand-powered and had a limited, but nonetheless remarkable, function: it followed the Metonic cycle, “the 235-month pattern that ancient astronomers used to predict eclipses,” writes Robby Berman at Big Think.

The ancient artifact known as the Antikythera mechanism — named for the Greek Island under which it was discovered — turned up in 1900. It took another three-quarters of a century before the secrets of what first appeared as a “corroded lump” revealed a device of some kind dating from 150 to 100 BC. “By 2009, modern imaging technology had identified all 30 of the Antikythera mechanism’s gears, and a virtual model of it was released,” as we noted in an earlier post.

The device could predict the positions of the planets (or at least those the Greeks knew of: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn), as well as the sun, moon, and eclipses. It placed Earth at the center of the universe. Researchers studying the Antikythera mechanism understood that much. But they couldn’t quite understand exactly how it worked, since only about a third of the complex mechanism has survived.

Image by University College London

Now, it appears that researchers from the University College of London have figured it out, debuting a new computational model in Scientific Reports. “Ours is the first model that conforms to all the physical evidence and matches the scientific inscriptions engraved on the mechanism itself,” lead author Tony Freeth tells The Engineer. In the video above, you can learn about the history of the mechanism and its rediscovery in the 20th century, and see a detailed explanation of Freeth and his team’s discoveries.

“About the size of a large dictionary,” the artifact has proven to be the “most complex piece of engineering from the ancient world” the video informs us. Having built a 3D model, the researchers next intend to build a replica of the device. If they can do so with “modern machinery,” writes Guardian science editor Ian Sample, “they aim to do the same with techniques from antiquity” — no small task considering that it’s “unclear how the ancient Greeks would have manufactured such components” without the use of a lathe, a tool they probably did not possess.

Image by University College London

The mechanism will still hold its secrets even if the UCL team’s model works. Why was it made, what was it used for? Were there other such devices? Hopefully, we won’t have to wait another several decades to learn the answers. Read the team’s Scientific Reports article here.

Modern Artists Show How the Ancient Greeks & Romans Made Coins, Vases & Artisanal Glass

How the Ancient Greeks Shaped Modern Mathematics: A Short, Animated Introduction

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

The Bayeux Tapestry Gets Digitized: View the Medieval Tapestry in High Resolution, Down to the Individual Thread

in Art, History | March 17th, 2021

The Bayeux Tapestry, one of the most famous artifacts of its kind, isn’t actually a tapestry. Technically, because the images it bears are embroidered onto the cloth rather than woven into it, we should call it the Bayeux Embroidery. To quibble over a matter like this rather misses the point — but then, so does taking too literally the story it tells in colored yarn over its 224-foot length. Commissioned, historians believe, as an apologia for the Norman conquest of England in 1066, this elaborate work of narrative visual art conveys events with a certain slant. But in so doing, the Bayeux’s 75 dramatic, bloody, ribald, and sometimes mysterious episodes also capture how people and things (and even Halley’s Comet) looked in medieval Europe.

It does this in great, if stylized detail, at which you can get a closer look than has ever before been available to the public at the Bayeux Museum’s web site. The museum “worked with teams from the University of Caen Normandie to digitize high-resolution images of the tapestry, which were taken in 2017,” says Medievalists.net.

“A simple interface was created to access the digital version, which allows users to zoom in and explore it in great detail with access to Latin translations in French and English.” Made of 2.6 billion pixels (which brings it to eight gigabytes in size), the online Bayeux Tapestry lets us zoom in so far as to examine its individual threads — the same level at which it was inspected in real life earlier last year in anticipation of its next restoration.

“A team of eight restorers, all specialists in antique textiles, carried out the detailed inspection in January 2020, a period when the museum was closed to visitors,” says Medievalists.net. “Among their findings were that the tapestry has 24,204 stains, 16,445 wrinkles, 9,646 gaps in the cloth or the embroidery, 30 non-stabilized tears, and significant weakening in the first few metres of the work.” (Notably, the colors applied in a 19th-century restoration have faded much more than the vegetable dyes used in the original.) Though currently a bit rough around the edges, the Bayeux Tapestry looks pretty good for its 950 or so years, as any of us can now look more than closely enough to see for ourselves. This is a credit to its makers — whose identities, for all the scrutiny performed on the work itself, may remain forever unknown. Explore the high-resolution scan of the Tapestry here.

via Smithsonian Magazine and Medievalists.net

Construct Your Own Bayeux Tapestry with This Free Online App

How the Ornate Tapestries from the Age of Louis XIV Were Made (and Are Still Made Today)

160,000 Pages of Glorious Medieval Manuscripts Digitized: Visit the Bibliotheca Philadelphiensis

Why Knights Fought Snails in Illuminated Medieval Manuscripts

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.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

17-Year-Old Adeline Harris Created a Quilt Collecting 360 Signatures of the Most Famous People of the 19th Century: Lincoln, Dickens, Emerson & More (1863)

in Art, History | March 17th, 2021

These days, anyone can reach out to hundreds of celebrities, artists, writers, major heads of state, etc., on social media (or to the interns and assistants who run their accounts). Instantaneous connection also means hundreds of near-instantaneous comments in near-real time. It can occasionally mean near-instantaneous influencer fame. For 17-year-old Adeline Harris, it would take seven years or so to get in touch with 360 of the biggest names in literature, politics, philosophy, science, and other fields of her time. Given that she started in 1856, that’s a somewhat extraordinary feat. It’s only one impressive feature of her Tumbling Block with Signatures Quilt, mostly completed sometime in 1863.

Harris’ quiltmaking project uses a “tumbling blocks pattern,” notes The History Blog, “characterized by a trompe l’oeil that gives it 3D cube effect. [She] showcased exceptional skill and mastery in her needlework and fabric choice, emphasizing the 3D effect with her arrangement of the varied patterns of silk pieces.”

The signatures on the white diamonds atop each “tumbling block” were mailed to Harris by request from a “who’s who” of mid-19th century luminaries, including “an astonishing eight presidents of the United States (Martin Van Buren, John Tyler, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, Ulysses S. Grant).”

The quilt also contains the signatures of Union generals, congressmen, journalists, academics, clergymen. Famous names include Samuel Morse, Horace Greeley, Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Jacob Grimm, Alexander von Humboldt, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Julia Ward Howe, Harriet Beecher Stowe, William Cullen Bryant, Alexandre Dumas, Oliver Wendell Holmes, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Charles Dickens. She placed the names in categories dividing the signatories by profession.

The full list “is nothing short of phenomenal,” the Public Domain Review writes, adding that “according to her grand-daughter the Lincoln signature was, due to a family connection, actually acquired in person, and Adeline was meant to have even danced with Lincoln at his inauguration ball.” Harris — later Adeline Harris Sears — came from a wealthy Rhode Island textile mill family and married a prominent clergyman. She spent most of her life in the state, and mailed most of her signature requests rather than delivering them firsthand.

Signature quilts were not new; they had been sewn for years to mark family occasions and other events. But never had they been a means of celebrity autograph-hunting, nor been created by a single individual. Collecting autographs, however, was quite popular. “Adeline’s taste for autographs… betrays her romantic nature,” writes Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Amelia Peck. “Among a certain segment of the population, it was believed that a person’s signature revealed significant aspects of his or her personality.”

It’s hard not to see the seeds of our contemporary culture in the consumption of celebrity autographs Peck describes: “By owning a signature of an illustrious person, one could learn about the characteristics that made him or her great and emulate those traits.” This mania for autographs “paralleled the nineteenth-century fascination with other types of pseudoscientific personality discovery, such as phrenology.” There were deep, mystical meanings in Adeline’s quilt, wrote editor Sarah Hale, who also donated a signature. In her 1868 book Manners, Happy Homes and Good Society All the Year Round, Hale explained what made the quilt a masterpiece:

In short, we think this autograph bedquilt may be called a very wonderful invention in the way of needlework. The mere mechanical part, the number of small pieces, stitches neatly taken and accurately ordered; the arranging properly and joining nicely 2780 delicate bits of various beautiful and costly fabrics, is a task that would require no small share of resolution, patience, firmness, and perseverance. Then comes the intellectual part, the taste to assort colors and to make the appearance what it ought to be, where so many hundreds of shades are to be matched and suited to each other. After that we rise to the moral, when human deeds are to live in names, the consideration of the celebrities, who are to be placed each, the centre of his or her own circle! To do this well requires a knowledge of books and life, and an instinctive sense of the fitness of things, so as to assign each name its suitable place in this galaxy of stars or diamonds.

See more close-ups of the quilt at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, who hold this one-of-a-kind work of signatory fabric art in their collections.

via the Public Domain Review

Too Big for Any Museum, AIDS Quilt Goes Digital Thanks to Microsoft

Bisa Butler’s Beautiful Quilted Portraits of Frederick Douglass, Nina Simone, Jean-Michel Basquiat & More

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Archeologists Reconstruct the Faces of 10-Century Medieval Dukes, Using DNA Analysis & 3‑D Models of Skulls

in History, Science | March 17th, 2021

Maybe you’ve sung the Christmas carol “Good King Wenceslas” and wondered who this good king was. The carol wasn’t written until the 19th century, but “Wenceslas was a real person,” writes NPR’s Tom Manoff, the patron saint of the Czechs and “the Duke of Bohemia, a 10th-century Christian prince in a land where many practiced a more ancient religion. In one version of his legend, Wenceslas was murdered in a plot by his brother,” Boleslav, “under the sway of their so-called pagan mother,” Drahomíra.

Wenceslas’ grandmother Ludmilla died a Christian martyr in 921 A.D. Her husband, Bořivoj, ruled as the first documented member of the Přemyslid Dynasty (late 800s-1306), and her two sons Spytihnĕv I (circa 875–915) and Vratislav I (circa 888–921), Wenceslas’ father, ruled after their father’s death. The skeletal remains of these royal Bohemian brothers were identified at Prague Castle in the 1980s by anthropologist Emanuel Vlček. Due to advances in DNA analysis and imaging, we can now see an approximation of what they looked like. (See Spytihnĕv at the top and Vratislav at the bottom in the image below.)

A Czech-Brazillian research team created the reconstructions, making “educated guesses” about the brothers’ hairstyles, beards, and clothing. “The team, which included archaeologists Jiří Šindelář and Jan Frolík, photographer Martin Frouz, and 3‑D technician Cicero André da Costa Moraes,” Isis Davis-Marks writes at Smithsonian, “has previously reconstructed the faces of Zdislava of Lemberk (circa 1220–1252), patron saint of families, and Czech monarch Judita of Thuringia (circa 1135–1174), among others.”

The project proceeded in several stages, with different experts involved along the way. “First,” notes Archaeology, “detailed images of the bones were assembled using photogrammetry to form virtual 3‑D models” of the skulls. Then, facial reconstruction expert Moraes added muscle, tissue, skin, etc., relying on “multiple three-dimensional reconstruction techniques,” Davis-Marks writes, “including anatomical and soft tissue depth methods, to ensure the highest possible level of accuracy.” DNA analysis showed that the brothers likely had blue eyes and reddish-brown hair.

Spytihnĕv and Vratislav’s other features come from the best guess of the researchers based on “miniatures or manuscripts,” says Frolík, “but we don’t really know.” Do they look a bit like video game characters? They look very much, in their digital sheen, like characters in a medieval video game. But perhaps we can anticipate a day when real people from the distant past return as fully animated 3D reconstructions to replay, for our education and amusement, the battles, court intrigues, and fratricides of history as we know it.

Beer Archaeology: Yes, It’s a Thing

The History of Europe from 400 BC to the Present, Animated in 12 Minutes

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

How Leonardo da Vinci Made His Magnificent Drawings Using Only a Metal Stylus, Pen & Ink, and Chalk

The Irish Aristocratic Woman Who Almost Assassinated Mussolini in 1926: An Introduction to Violet Gibson

The Growth of London, from the Romans to the 21st Century, Visualized in a Time-Lapse Animated Map

How Edward Munch Signaled His Bohemian Rebellion with Cigarettes (1895): A Video Essay

Researchers Develop a Digital Model of the 2,200-Year-Old Antikythera Mechanism, “the World’s First Computer”

The Bayeux Tapestry Gets Digitized: View the Medieval Tapestry in High Resolution, Down to the Individual Thread

17-Year-Old Adeline Harris Created a Quilt Collecting 360 Signatures of the Most Famous People of the 19th Century: Lincoln, Dickens, Emerson & More (1863)

Archeologists Reconstruct the Faces of 10-Century Medieval Dukes, Using DNA Analysis & 3‑D Models of Skulls

Essentials

Support Us

Free Courses

Receive our Daily Email

FREE UPDATES!

GET OUR DAILY EMAIL

Free Movies

Free Language Lessons

Free eBooks

Free Audio Books

Free Textbooks

K-12 Resources

Free Art & Images

Free Music

Writing Tips

Archive

Personal Finance

Categories

Great Lectures

Sign up for Newsletter

About Us

Great Recordings

Book Lists By

Syllabi

Favorite Movies

Archives

Search