#Onthisday in 1837, Queen Victoria ascended to the throne and so began the Victorian era. Of the vast amounts of Victorian content on our site, this is perhaps our favourite — a dictionary of Victorian slang:

The Public Domain Review

A Dictionary of Victorian Slang (1909)

A book detailing the slang of the Victorian era, including such delights as "afternoonified", "bang up the elephant", "shoot into the brown", and "...

#OnThisDay in 1878, Eadweard Muybridge took this series of images of a racehorse in motion. A former governor of California reportedly had bet on whether all the hooves were airborne at once, and hired Muybridge to settle the debate:

The Public Domain Review

The Attitudes of Animals in Motion, Illustrated with the Zoopraxiscope (1882)

Published lecture given by the pioneering photographer Eadweard Muybridge on March 13th 1882 at the Royal Institution in London in front of a sell ...

#OTD

In need of a last minute #FathersDay gift? We do "gift cards" for our online prints shop. It allows you to pre-pay for print and then your recipient to choose the image they’d like:

The Public Domain Review

Gift of a Print

Online journal and not-for-profit project dedicated to the exploration of curious and compelling works from the history of art, literature, and ideas.

First page of "Dialogue of Frederic Ruysch and his Mummies", a short skit by the great Italian writer Giacomo Leopardi, who died today in 1837 (aged just 38). Leopardi's subject here is a real life physician renowned for his macabre anatomical displays: https://buff.ly/2Tu5t7w

Collection of erotic cameos from antiquity, published circa 1771 by the French art historian and self-styled “baron” Pierre-François Hugues d'Hancarville:

The Public Domain Review

Erotic Cameos from Antiquity (ca. 1771)

Collection of erotic gemstones from antiquity, presented by the French art historian and libertine Pierre-François Hugues d'Hancarville.

"They were three months passing through the forest", an illustration (for Old French Fairy Tales, 1920) by Virginia Frances Sterrett who died of tuberculosis #onthisday in 1931, at the age of just 30. See more of her magical illustrations here:

The Public Domain Review

Old French Fairytales, illustrated by Virginia Frances Sterrett (1920)

A collection of works by French author, Comtesse de Ségur and exquisitely illustrated by a 19 year old Virginia Sterrett, her first commission.

#OTD

In her essay “Reading Like a Roman”, Alex Tadel explores Graeco-Roman reading culture through one of its best-preserved and most lavishly-illustrated artefacts:

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Reading Like a Roman: Vergilius Vaticanus and the Puzzle of Ancient Book Culture

How did Virgil’s words survive into the present? And how were they once read, during his own life and the succeeding centuries? Alex Tadel explor...

Bert van de Roemer on the curiosity cabinet of the Dutch collector Levinus Vincent (1658-1727) and the aesthetic drive behind his meticulous ordering of its contents:

The Public Domain Review

Redressing the Balance: Levinus Vincent’s Wonder Theatre of Nature

Bert van de Roemer explores the curiosity cabinet of the Dutch collector Levinus Vincent and how the aesthetic drive behind his meticulous ordering...

@rijksmuseum

Pages from Geometria (1543) by German artist, mathematician, and cartographer Augustin Hirschvogel. In this version from the Deutsche Fotothek, amid the rigid lines of the geometrical sketches appear the chaotic forms of stains:

The Public Domain Review

“I Reunite Architecture and Perspective”: Hirschvogel’s *Geometria* (1543)

Geometrical drawings inspired by Dürer that feature “nets”, representations of unfolded polyhedra.

Drawing on sources as varied as Wordsworth, Hitchcock, and Conan Doyle, author @PhilipPullman considers the sonic beauty and expert storytelling of Milton's masterpiece and the influence it has had on his own work:

The Public Domain Review

The Sound and the Story: Exploring the World of Paradise Lost

John Milton’s Paradise Lost has been many things to many people — a Christian epic, a comment on the English Civil War, the epitome of poetic a...