Download 435 High Resolution Images from John J. Audubon’s The Birds of America

in Art, Biology, Nature | January 15th, 2026

In our expe­ri­ence, bird lovers fall into two gen­er­al cat­e­gories:

Keen­ly obser­vant cat­a­loguers like John James Audubon …

And those of us who can­not resist assign­ing anthro­po­mor­phic per­son­al­i­ties and behav­iors to the 435 stars of Audubon’s The Birds of Amer­i­ca, a stun­ning col­lec­tion of prints from life-size water­col­ors he pro­duced between 1827 and 1838.

Our sus­pi­cions have lit­tle to do with biol­o­gy, but rather, a cer­tain zesti­ness of expres­sion, an overem­phat­ic beak, a droll gleam in the eye.

The Audubon Society’s new­ly redesigned web­site abounds with trea­sure for those in either camp:

Free high res down­loads of all 435 plates.

Mp3s of each specimen’s call.

And vin­tage com­men­tary that effec­tive­ly splits the dif­fer­ence between sci­ence and the unin­ten­tion­al­ly humor­ous locu­tions of anoth­er age.

Take for instance, the Bur­row­ing Owl, as described by self-taught nat­u­ral­ist Thomas Say (1787–1834):

It is delight­ful, dur­ing fine weath­er, to see these live­ly lit­tle crea­tures sport­ing about the entrance of their bur­rows, which are always kept in the neat­est repair, and are often inhab­it­ed by sev­er­al indi­vid­u­als. When alarmed, they imme­di­ate­ly take refuge in their sub­ter­ranean cham­bers; or, if the dread­ed dan­ger be not imme­di­ate­ly impend­ing, they stand near the brink of the entrance, brave­ly bark­ing and flour­ish­ing their tails, or else sit erect to recon­noitre the move­ments of the ene­my.

The notes of ornithol­o­gist John Kirk Townsend (1809 – 1851) sug­gest that not every­one was as tak­en with the species as Say (who was, in all fair­ness, the father of Amer­i­can ento­mol­o­gy):

Noth­ing can be more unpleas­ant than the bag­ging of this species, on account of the fleas with which their plumage swarms, and which in all prob­a­bil­i­ty have been left in the bur­row by the Bad­ger or Mar­mot, at the time it was aban­doned by these ani­mals. I know of no oth­er bird infest­ed by that kind of ver­min. 

The Com­mon Gallinule, above, sug­gests that there’s often more to these birds than meets the eye. His some­what sheep­ish look­ing coun­te­nance belies the red hot love life Audubon recounts:

… the man­i­fes­ta­tions of their ama­to­ry propen­si­ty were quite remark­able. The male birds court­ed the females, both on the land and on the water; they fre­quent­ly spread out their tail like a fan, and moved round each oth­er, emit­ting a mur­mur­ing sound for some sec­onds. The female would after­wards walk to the water’s edge, stand in the water up to her breast, and receive the caress­es of the male, who imme­di­ate­ly after would strut on the water before her, jerk­ing with rapid­i­ty his spread tail for awhile, after which they would both resume their ordi­nary occu­pa­tions.

Being that we are firm­ly plant­ed in the sec­ond type of bird lover’s camp, this ornitho­log­i­cal cor­nu­copia main­ly serves to whet our appetite for more Falseknees, self-described bird nerd Joshua Barkman’s beau­ti­ful­ly ren­dered web­com­ic.

Yes, Audubon’s Indi­go Bird, aka Petit Pape­bleu, “an active and live­ly lit­tle fel­low” who “pos­sess­es much ele­gance in his shape, and also a cer­tain degree of firm­ness in his make” was sep­a­rat­ed by a cen­tu­ry or so from “Mood Indi­go”—we pre­sume that’s the tune stuck in Barkman’s bird’s head—but he does look rather pre­oc­cu­pied, no?

Pos­si­bly just think­ing of meal­worms…

Explore Audubon’s Birds of Amer­i­ca by chrono­log­i­cal or alpha­bet­i­cal order, or by state, and down­load them all for free here.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2019.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Cor­nell Launch­es Archive of 150,000 Bird Calls and Ani­mal Sounds, with Record­ings Going Back to 1929

A Lav­ish­ly Illus­trat­ed Cat­a­log of All Hum­ming­bird Species Known in the 19th Cen­tu­ry Gets Restored & Put Online

What Kind of Bird Is That?: A Free App From Cor­nell Will Give You the Answer

Explore an Inter­ac­tive Ver­sion of The Wall of Birds, a 2,500 Square-Foot Mur­al That Doc­u­ments the Evo­lu­tion of Birds Over 375 Mil­lion Years

The Bird Library: A Library Built Espe­cial­ly for Our Fine Feath­ered Friends

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, and the­ater mak­er in NYC.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

300,000 Wondrous Nature Illustrations Put Online by The Biodiversity Heritage Library

in Art, Nature, Photography, Science | January 6th, 2026

Are we tru­ly in the midst of a human-caused sixth mass extinc­tion, an era of “bio­log­i­cal anni­hi­la­tion”? Many sci­en­tists and pop­u­lar sci­ence writ­ers say yes, using terms like “Holocene” or “Anthro­pocene” to describe what fol­lows the Ordovi­cian, Devon­ian, Per­mi­an, Tri­as­sic, and Cre­ta­ceous peri­ods. Peter Bran­nen, the author of extinc­tion his­to­ry The Ends of the Earth has found at least one sci­en­tist who thinks the con­cept is “junk.” But Bran­nen quotes some alarm­ing sta­tis­tics. Chill­ing, even. “Until very recent­ly,” he writes, “all ver­te­brate life on the plan­et was wildlife. But astound­ing­ly, today wildlife accounts for only 3 per­cent of Earth’s land ani­mals; human beings, our live­stock, and our pets take up the remain­ing 97 per­cent of the bio­mass… almost half of the Earth’s land has been con­vert­ed into farm­land.”

This state of affairs does not bode well for the mil­lions of remain­ing species get­ting edged out of their envi­ron­ments by agribusi­ness and cli­mate change. We learn from extinc­tions past that the plan­et rebounds after unimag­in­able cat­a­stro­phe. Life real­ly does go on, though it may take mil­lions of years to recov­er. But the cur­rent forms of life may dis­ap­pear before their time. If we want to under­stand what is at stake besides our own frag­ile fos­sil-fuel-based civ­i­liza­tions, we need to con­nect to life emo­tion­al­ly as well as intel­lec­tu­al­ly. Short of globe-hop­ping phys­i­cal immer­sion in the Earth’s bio­di­ver­si­ty, we could hard­ly do bet­ter than immers­ing our­selves in the tra­di­tion of nat­u­ral­ist writ­ing, art, and pho­tog­ra­phy that brings the world to us.

The Bio­di­ver­si­ty Her­itage Library (BHL), an “open access dig­i­tal library for bio­di­ver­si­ty lit­er­a­ture and archives,” has for many years been mak­ing it easy for peo­ple to con­nect to nature through nature writ­ing and illus­tra­tion. On Flickr, you can find 319,000 care­ful­ly curat­ed images. The col­lec­tion itself is sub­di­vid­ed into dif­fer­ent pho­to albums drawn from his­tor­i­cal pub­li­ca­tions. For exam­ple, The Fresh­wa­ter Fish­es of the British Isles (1911), The Bird (1869), and The Insect Book (1901).

This image archive offers expan­sive views of human­i­ty’s encounter with the nat­ur­al world, not only through sta­tis­tics and aca­d­e­m­ic jar­gon, but through the artis­tic record­ing of won­der, sci­en­tif­ic curios­i­ty, and deep appre­ci­a­tion. Enter the archive here.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2017.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ernst Haeckel’s Sub­lime Draw­ings of Flo­ra & Fau­na: The Beau­ti­ful Sci­en­tif­ic Draw­ings That Influ­enced Europe’s Art Nou­veau Move­ment (1889)

Explore a New Archive of 2,200 His­tor­i­cal Wildlife Illus­tra­tions (1916–1965): Cour­tesy of The Wildlife Con­ser­va­tion Soci­ety

In 1886, the US Gov­ern­ment Com­mis­sioned 7,500 Water­col­or Paint­ings of Every Known Fruit in the World: Down­load Them in High Res­o­lu­tion

Watch 50 Hours of Nature Sound­scapes from the BBC: Sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly Proven to Ease Stress and

The Metic­u­lous, Ele­gant Illus­tra­tions of the Nature Observed in England’s Coun­try­side

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. 

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

When Two Filmmakers Make the Same Movie — and One of Them Is Werner Herzog

in Film, Nature | January 2nd, 2026

In 1991, the French hus­band-and-wife vol­ca­nol­o­gist-film­mak­er team Mau­rice and Katia Krafft were killed by the flow of ash from the erup­tion of Mount Unzen in Nagasa­ki. Inex­plic­a­bly, Wern­er Her­zog did­n’t get around to mak­ing a film about them for more than 30 years. These would seem to be ide­al sub­jects for the doc­u­men­tary half of his career, a large por­tion of which he’s spent on por­traits of eccen­tric, roman­tic, often fool­hardy, and more than occa­sion­al­ly ill-fat­ed indi­vid­u­als who pit them­selves, or in any case find them­selves pit­ted, against the raw ele­ments of nature. Their cou­ple­hood makes the Kraffts a slight excep­tion in that line­up, but it also makes them even less resistible to a more con­ven­tion­al doc­u­men­tar­i­an — not that a doc­u­men­tar­i­an could get much less con­ven­tion­al than Her­zog.

Hence, per­haps, the appear­ance of two entire­ly sep­a­rate doc­u­men­taries on the Kraffts in the same year, 2022: Her­zog’s The Fire With­in, and Sara Dosa’s Fire of Love. The Like Sto­ries of Old video above per­forms a direct com­par­i­son of the two films, both of which make heavy use of the vol­cano footage shot by the Kraffts them­selves.

Her­zog assem­bles it into word­less, oper­at­i­cal­ly scored, and some­times quite long sequences, inten­si­fy­ing their qual­i­ty of the sub­lime, which we feel in that aes­thet­ic zone where awe of beau­ty and fear of exis­ten­tial anni­hi­la­tion over­lap com­plete­ly. These do noth­ing to advance a nar­ra­tive, but every­thing to put forth what Her­zog has often referred to in inter­views as a sense of “ecsta­t­ic truth,” a dis­til­la­tion of real­i­ty that can­not be cap­tured by any con­ven­tion­al doc­u­men­tary means.

The video’s host Tom van der Lin­den describes Fire of Love as “much more fast-paced. Images come and go so quick­ly that they don’t real­ly have a chance to reveal that strange, secret beau­ty, to take the spot­light with their own mys­te­ri­ous star­dom. Instead, they feel sub­servient to what­ev­er pre­de­ter­mined emo­tion the nar­ra­tive wants you to expe­ri­ence,” as if the direc­tor is giv­ing you orders: “Be in awe. Feel the romance. And now the com­e­dy.” That hard­ly sug­gests incom­pe­tence on the part of Dosa and her col­lab­o­ra­tors, or any defi­cien­cy in her high­ly acclaimed film. But it does give us a sense of what becomes weary­ing about the tech­niques of main­stream cin­e­ma in gen­er­al, fic­tion­al, or non­fic­tion­al. The truth is that Wern­er Her­zog may be unique­ly well placed to appre­ci­ate not just the fear­some­ly enrap­tur­ing object of the Kraffts’ obses­sion, but also the dri­ving pas­sion, and flash­es of ridicu­lous­ness, in the Kraffts them­selves — who were, after all, fel­low sol­diers of cin­e­ma.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Dream-Dri­ven Film­mak­ing of Wern­er Her­zog: Watch the Video Essay, “The Inner Chron­i­cle of What We Are: Under­stand­ing Wern­er Her­zog”

An Intro­duc­tion to the Paint­ing of Cas­par David Friedrich, Roman­ti­cism & the Sub­lime

Watch the Destruc­tion of Pom­peii by Mount Vesu­vius, Re-Cre­at­ed with Com­put­er Ani­ma­tion (79 AD)

Under­wa­ter Vol­canic Erup­tion Wit­nessed for the First Time

Two Ways To Shoot The Same Scene: A Com­par­i­son of The Shop Around the Cor­ner (1940) and You’ve Got Mail (1998) Shows How Film­mak­ing Changed Over the Decades

Wern­er Her­zog Dis­cov­ers the Ecsta­sy of Skate­board­ing: “That’s Kind of My Peo­ple”

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

Discover the Oldest, Weirdest Instrument On Earth: The Lithophone

in Music, Nature | October 1st, 2025

Sta­lac­tites hang tight to the ceil­ing, and sta­lag­mites push up with might from the floor: this is a mnemon­ic device you may once have learned, but chances are you haven’t had much occa­sion to remem­ber it since. Still, it would sure­ly be called to mind by a vis­it to Luray Cav­erns in the Amer­i­can state of Vir­ginia, home of the Great Sta­lacpipe Organ. As its name sug­gests, that attrac­tion is an organ made out of sta­lac­tites, the geo­log­i­cal for­ma­tions that grow from cave ceil­ings. Not long after the dis­cov­ery of Luray Cav­erns itself in 1878, its sta­lac­tites were found to res­onate through the under­ground space in an almost musi­cal fash­ion when struck — a prop­er­ty Leland W. Sprin­kle took to its log­i­cal con­clu­sion in the mid-nine­teen fifties.

“Dur­ing a tour of this world-famous nat­ur­al won­der, Mr. Sprin­kle watched in awe, which was still cus­tom­ary at the time, as a tour guide tapped the ancient stone for­ma­tions with a small mal­let, pro­duc­ing a musi­cal tone,” says Luray Cav­erns’ offi­cial site. “Mr. Sprin­kle was great­ly inspired by this demon­stra­tion and the idea for a most unique instru­ment was con­ceived.”

Con­cep­tion was one thing, but exe­cu­tion quite anoth­er: it took him three years to locate just the right sta­lac­tites, shave them down to ring out at just the right fre­quen­cy, and rig them up with elec­tron­i­cal­ly acti­vat­ed, key­board-con­trolled mal­lets. For the tech­ni­cal­ly mind­ed Sprin­kle, who worked at the Pen­ta­gon as a math­e­mati­cian and elec­tron­ics sci­en­tist, this must not have been quite as tedious a labor as it sounds.

The result was the biggest, the old­est (at least accord­ing to the age of the cave itself), and arguably the weird­est musi­cal instru­ment on Earth, a litho­phone for the mid-twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry’s hero­ic age of engi­neer­ing. You can see the Great Sta­lacpipe Organ in the video from Ver­i­ta­si­um at the top of the post, and hear a record­ing of Sprin­kle him­self play­ing it below that. In the video just above, YouTu­ber and musi­cian Rob Scal­lon gets a chance to take it for a spin. View­ers of his chan­nel know how much expe­ri­ence he has with exot­ic instru­ments (includ­ing the glass armon­i­ca, orig­i­nal­ly invent­ed by Ben Franklin, which we’ve fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture), but even so, the oppor­tu­ni­ty to play a cave — and to make use of its sur­round sound avant la let­tre — hard­ly comes every day. Here we have proof that the old, weird Amer­i­ca endures, and that the Great Sta­lacpipe Organ is its ide­al sound­track.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch an Archae­ol­o­gist Play the “Litho­phone,” a Pre­his­toric Instru­ment That Let Ancient Musi­cians Play Real Clas­sic Rock

Nick Cave Nar­rates an Ani­mat­ed Film about the Cat Piano, the Twist­ed 18th Cen­tu­ry Musi­cal Instru­ment Designed to Treat Men­tal Ill­ness

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 the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

How 16th-Century Artist Joris Hoefnagel Made Insects Beautiful—and Changed Science Forever

in Art, History, Nature | July 2nd, 2025

In Eng­lish, most of the words we’d use to refer to insects sound off-putting at best and fear­some at worst, at least to those with­out an ento­mo­log­i­cal bent. Dutch, close a lin­guis­tic rela­tion though it may be, offers a more endear­ing alter­na­tive in beestjes, which refers to all these “lit­tle beasts” in which the artists and sci­en­tists of Europe start­ed to take a major inter­est in the late six­teenth cen­tu­ry. As was the style of that era, the mag­is­te­ria of art and sci­ence tend­ed to over­lap, a phe­nom­e­non nowhere more clear­ly reflect­ed — at least with regard to the insect king­dom — than in the work of Joris Hoef­nagel, a Flem­ish artist whose illus­tra­tions of beestjes com­bined beau­ty and accu­ra­cy in a man­ner nev­er seen before.


You can now see Hoef­nagel’s art up close at the exhi­bi­tion Lit­tle Beasts: Art, Won­der, and the Nat­ur­al World, which will be up at the Nation­al Gallery of Art in Wash­ing­ton, DC until ear­ly Novem­ber. If you won’t be able to make it out to the muse­um, have a look at the exhi­bi­tion’s web site, which shows off the splen­dor of Hoef­nagel’s work as pub­lished in The Four Ele­ments, a col­lec­tion of about 300 water­col­ors grouped into four vol­umes in the fif­teen-sev­en­ties and eight­ies, each one named for an ele­ment: Aqua con­tains water ani­mals; Ter­ra land ani­mals; Aier birds and plants; and Ignis, or “fire,” insects.

“We don’t real­ly know why Hoef­nagel put insects in the fire vol­ume,” says Evan “Nerd­writer” Puschak in the new video above. “Maybe because both fire and insects sym­bol­ize trans­for­ma­tion.”


“What we do know,” Puschak adds, “is that these insect minia­tures are mag­nif­i­cent­ly ren­dered.” Hoef­nagel even made improve­ments on the nature illus­tra­tions of his artis­tic pre­de­ces­sor Albrecht Dür­er, whose own abil­i­ties to ren­der our world with fideli­ty had been regard­ed as near­ly super­hu­man. One par­tic­u­lar work that sur­pass­es Dür­er is Hoef­nagel’s depic­tion of a stag bee­tle, which he accom­pa­nied with the Latin inscrip­tion “SCARABEI UMBRA,” or “the shad­ow of the stag bee­tle”: pos­si­bly a ref­er­ence to the unprece­dent­ed real­ism of the insec­t’s shad­ow as Hoef­nagel ren­dered it, but in any case a com­mon say­ing at the time about hol­low threats. For how­ev­er fright­en­ing the stag bee­tle looked, as Hoef­nagel well knew, the actu­al crea­ture was gen­tle — just anoth­er wee beast­ie after all.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Genius of Albrecht Dür­er Revealed in Four Self-Por­traits

Vladimir Nabokov’s Delight­ful But­ter­fly Draw­ings

Ernst Haeckel’s Sub­lime Draw­ings of Flo­ra and Fau­na: The Beau­ti­ful Sci­en­tif­ic Draw­ings That Influ­enced Europe’s Art Nou­veau Move­ment (1889)

Two Mil­lion Won­drous Nature Illus­tra­tions Put Online by The Bio­di­ver­si­ty Her­itage Library

Cap­ti­vat­ing Col­lab­o­ra­tion: Artist Hubert Duprat Uses Insects to Cre­ate Gold­en Sculp­tures

Watch The Insects’ Christ­mas from 1913: A Stop Motion Film Star­ring a Cast of Dead Bugs

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 the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

NASA Visualizes the Ocean Currents in Motion: A Mesmerizing View of Earth’s Underwater Highways

in Environment, Nature, Science | March 25th, 2025

The mes­mer­iz­ing video above lets you visu­al­ize the ocean cur­rents around the world. Using data from space­craft, buoys, and oth­er mea­sure­ments, the visu­al­iza­tion shows the ocean in motion, with the cur­rents cre­at­ing Van Gogh-like swirls around the globe.

Accord­ing to NASA, “the ocean has been [his­tor­i­cal­ly] dif­fi­cult to mod­el. Sci­en­tists strug­gled in years past to sim­u­late ocean cur­rents or accu­rate­ly pre­dict fluc­tu­a­tions in tem­per­a­ture, salin­i­ty, and oth­er prop­er­ties. As a result, mod­els of ocean dynam­ics rapid­ly diverged from real­i­ty, which meant they could only pro­vide use­ful infor­ma­tion for brief peri­ods.” This all changed, how­ev­er, when NASA and oth­er part­ners devel­oped ECCO, short for “Esti­mat­ing the Cir­cu­la­tion and Cli­mate of the Ocean.” “By apply­ing the laws of physics to data from mul­ti­ple satel­lites and thou­sands of float­ing sen­sors, NASA sci­en­tists and their col­lab­o­ra­tors built ECCO to be a real­is­tic, detailed, and con­tin­u­ous ocean mod­el that spans decades.” “The project pro­vides mod­els that are the best pos­si­ble recon­struc­tion of the past 30 years of the glob­al ocean. It allows us to under­stand the ocean’s phys­i­cal process­es at scales that are not nor­mal­ly observ­able.” Watch above as years of ocean data come to life in a crisp, com­pelling visu­al­iza­tion.

via Laugh­ing Squid

Relat­ed Con­tent 

132 Years of Glob­al Warm­ing Visu­al­ized in 26 Dra­mat­i­cal­ly Ani­mat­ed Sec­onds

What the Earth Would Look Like If We Drained the Water from the Oceans

A Fas­ci­nat­ing 3D Ani­ma­tion Shows the Depths of the Ocean

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

The Mushroom Color Atlas: An Interactive Web Site Lets You Explore the Incredible Spectrum of Colors Created from Fungi

in Art, Nature | November 13th, 2024

Enter the Mush­room Col­or Atlas, and you can dis­cov­er the “beau­ti­ful and sub­tle col­ors derived from dye­ing with mush­rooms.” Fea­tur­ing 825 col­ors, each asso­ci­at­ed with dif­fer­ent types of mush­rooms, the inter­ac­tive atlas lets you appre­ci­ate the broad spec­trum of col­ors latent in the fun­gi king­dom. The shades, tints, and hues will sur­prise you.

Julie Beel­er, a design­er liv­ing in Ore­gon, first launched the inter­ac­tive Mush­room Col­or Atlas back in 2021. Now, she has released a com­pan­ion book, The Mush­room Col­or Atlas: A Guide to Dyes and Pig­ments Made from Fun­gi. Illus­trat­ed by Yuli Gates, the book is “equal parts art book, field guide, and col­or dis­til­la­tion work­shop.” You can order your copy today. The same goes for a Mush­room Col­or Atlas poster.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent 

A Stun­ning, Hand-Illus­trat­ed Book of Mush­rooms Drawn by an Over­looked 19th Cen­tu­ry Female Sci­en­tist

Björk Takes You on a Jour­ney into the Vast King­dom of Mush­rooms with the New Doc­u­men­tary Fun­gi: Web of Life

The Beau­ti­ful­ly Illus­trat­ed Atlas of Mush­rooms: Edi­ble, Sus­pect and Poi­so­nous (1827)

John Cage Had a Sur­pris­ing Mush­room Obses­sion (Which Began with His Pover­ty in the Depres­sion)

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Behold the Kräuterbuch, a Lavishly Illustrated Guide to Plants and Herbs from 1462

in Art, Books, History, Nature | July 29th, 2024

When Kon­rad von Megen­berg pub­lished his Buch der Natur in the mid-four­teenth cen­tu­ry, he won the dis­tinc­tion of hav­ing assem­bled the very first nat­ur­al his­to­ry in Ger­man. More than half a mil­len­ni­um lat­er, the book still fas­ci­nates — not least for its depic­tions of cats, pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture. Even the works derived from it have charms of their own: take the Kräuter­buch (or “Book of Herbs”) from 1462, in which Duke Albrecht III of Bavari­a’s per­son­al physi­cian Johannes Hartlieb adapts a sec­tion of the Buch der Natur with its own full com­ple­ment of 160 illus­tra­tions.

“Hartlieb’s sub­ject is plants, most­ly herbs, and their med­ical uses,” says the Library of Con­gress, on whose site you can view and down­load the book. “What makes the Kräuterbuch spe­cial is the side-by-side pre­sen­ta­tion of text and images. The high cost of such a rich­ly dec­o­rat­ed book makes it unlike­ly that it was actu­al­ly used by doc­tors or phar­ma­cists of the time.”

But even if they lack a cer­tain sci­en­tif­ic prac­ti­cal­i­ty, these botan­i­cal pre­sen­ta­tions have a bright, sim­ple bold­ness that, in some respect, suits our visu­al aes­thet­ics here in the ear­ly twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry; you could call it a renais­sance equiv­a­lent of flat design.

“Each chap­ter of the Kräuter­buch fol­lows a tra­di­tion­al sys­tem of botan­i­cal clas­si­fi­ca­tion derived from the Greek philoso­pher Theophras­tus,” writes Hunter Dukes at the Pub­lic Domain Review, which also offers a gallery of the book’s illus­tra­tions. “Ani­mals are por­trayed as phar­ma­co­log­i­cal­ly knowl­edge­able, such as in an account of deer rub­bing them­selves on pep­per­weed (Lep­id­i­um lat­i­foli­um) to remove hunters’ arrows”; anoth­er sec­tion holds that “dead­ly car­rots (Thap­sia) aid beg­gars in their decep­tions — rubbed on the face, they will pro­duce signs of lep­rosy, which can also be cured with vine­gar.” Dis­cussing the poi­so­nous man­drake (see image imme­di­ate­ly above), Hartlieb car­ries for­ward von Megen­berg’s sug­ges­tion “that its mag­i­cal prop­er­ties should be kept secret from com­mon­ers,” who, nat­u­ral­ly, would nev­er be in pos­ses­sion of such a lav­ish tome. Now all of us can access the Kräuter­buch — and most of us know that we’d be bet­ter off not mess­ing around with man­drake at all.

via the Pub­lic Domain Review

Relat­ed con­tent:

The New Herbal: A Mas­ter­piece of Renais­sance Botan­i­cal Illus­tra­tions Gets Repub­lished in a Beau­ti­ful 900-Page Book

Hor­tus Eystet­ten­sis: The Beau­ti­ful­ly Illus­trat­ed Book of Plants That Changed Botan­i­cal Art Overnight (1613)

A Curi­ous Herbal: 500 Beau­ti­ful Illus­tra­tions of Med­i­c­i­nal Plants Drawn by Eliz­a­beth Black­well in 1737 (to Save Her Fam­i­ly from Finan­cial Ruin)

Behold a 15th-Cen­tu­ry Ital­ian Man­u­script Fea­tur­ing Med­i­c­i­nal Plants with Fan­tas­ti­cal Human Faces

The Sur­pris­ing Map of Plants: A New Ani­ma­tion Shows How All the Dif­fer­ent Plants Relate to Each Oth­er

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 or on Face­book.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

More in this category... »
Quantcast