An Animated Reconstruction of Ancient Rome: Take A 30-Minute Stroll Through the City’s Virtually-Recreated Streets

in History | February 13th, 2019

There are numerous ancient stories illustrating the gargantuan ego of the Emperor Nero. Some of these may rise to the level of historical character assassination. Nero did not, for example, fiddle while Rome burned. For one thing, the fiddle did not exist. For another, as the historian Tacitus records, although the emperor was miles away at his villa in Antium when the fires began, it’s said he returned to Rome and led relief efforts, paying for many of them out of his own pocket and housing the newly homeless in his garden.

But the story may have been rewritten to burnish Nero’s reputation. After the masses blamed him for starting the fire, he turned around and blamed the city’s Christians, Tacitus reports, staging elaborate spectacles of torture, burning, and dismemberment. Suetonius does record him as giving some sort of musical performance during the fires of 64 A.D., a rumor that had apparently taken hold among the people. Whatever part he played, and whatever truth there is to charges that he murdered the son of Claudius, one of his wives, and even his own mother, Nero clearly felt a pressing need to leave a different impression of himself—as a towering, bronze god-like figure nearly 100 feet high.

In the same year as the fires, he commissioned a colossal statue of himself as the sun god, inspired by the Colossus of Rhodes. The massive Nero held a rudder perched atop a globe, suggesting that his rule steered the course of the whole world. Nero killed himself before the statue was completed, but Pliny the Elder writes of seeing its creation in the studio of the sculptor, Zenodorus. It arose towering above his palace, the Domus Aurea, in 72 A.D., and in 127, Hadrian moved it near the Amphitheatrum Flavium, which subsequently became known in the statue’s honor as the Colosseum. It took up to 24 elephants to do the job, or so it’s said.

For the next few hundred years, until at least the sack of Rome by Alaric in 410 and a subsequent series of earthquakes, residents and visitors to the city walked beneath the looming Nero/Helios/Apollo statue, just fifty feet shy of the Statue of Liberty. It was depicted on medallions and gems. Now the statue is completely vanished, with nothing but a remnant of its pedestal remaining. But you can see it reconstructed, along with 27 other ancient Roman monuments, temples, baths, mausoleums, amphitheaters, arenas, etc.—many of them as grandiose and storied as the Colossus—in the thirty-minute video above.

No, it’s not like strolling the streets of ancient Rome. The blockily-rendered CGI recreations appear over contemporary video of the city, full of contemporary traffic and contemporary fashions. As in every historical recreation of antiquity, for which the sources are few and contradictory, we have to use our imaginations. The exercise is infinitely richer the more you learn about the vanished or ruined structures that once dominated the city. See the full list of ancient buildings and sculptures below.

0:10 Palatine Hill (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palatin…)

3:25 The Forum (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_F…)

5:22 Basilica of Maxentius (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basilic…)

7:18 Temple of Vesta (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_…)

7:26 House of the Vestals (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_o…)

7:48 Temple of Castor and Pollux (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_…)

8:03 Temple of Caesar (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_…)

8:13 Basilica Aemilia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basilic…)

8:40 Basilica Julia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basilic…)

9:17 Temple of Saturn (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_…)

10:56 Curia Julia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curia_J…)

12:18 Forum of Augustus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forum_o…)

13:05 Forum of Nerva (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forum_o…)

13:47 Trajan’s Forum (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trajan%…)

14:54 Forum of Caesar (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forum_o…)

15:29 Colosseum (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colosseum)

17:42 Temple of Venus and Roma (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_…)

18:59 Colossus of Nero and Meta Sudans (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossu… -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta_Su…)

19:28 Baths of Caracalla (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baths_o…)

26:39 Pantheon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantheo…)

28:13 Stadium of Domitian (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stadium…)

29:23 Mausoleum of Augustus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mausole…)

29:39 Circus Maximus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circus_…)

30:25 Sacred area (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Largo_d…)

31:21 Theatre of Pompey (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theatre…)

31:56 Theatre of Marcellus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theatre…)

32:05 Tiber Island (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiber_I…)

32:32 Mausoleum of Hadrian (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castel_…)

An Interactive Map Shows Just How Many Roads Actually Lead to Rome

All the Roman Roads of Italy, Visualized as a Modern Subway Map

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 6 ) |

How Talking Heads and Brian Eno Wrote “Once in a Lifetime”: Cutting Edge, Strange & Utterly Brilliant

in Music | February 12th, 2019

Few albums of the late 1970s and early 1980s have held up as well as those by Talking Heads, but what to call the music recorded on them? Rock? Pop? New Wave? In the difficulty to pin it down lies its enduring appeal, and that difficulty didn’t come about by accident: impatient with musical categorizations and expectations, frontman David Byrne and the rest of the band kept pushing themselves into new territories even after they’d begun to find success. When they set out to create their fourth album, 1980’s Remain in Light, “they were looking to change the way they made songs.” Instead of leaving the writing to Byrne, “the band wanted a more democratic process. And so they tried something they never had before.”

So says the Polyphonic video above on how the band wrote “Once in a Lifetime,” surely the most beloved song on Remain in Light and quite possibly the most beloved in Talking Heads’ entire catalog. “Inspired by Afrobeat legend Fela Kuti, the instrumentalists in the band recorded a number of jams,” such as the proto-“Once in a Lifetime” outtake “Right Start” (which itself followed on “I Zimbra” from Talking Heads’ previous album, Fear of Music).

When bassist Tina Weymouth came up with a striking bass line, the band “took that lick and extrapolated it, slowly building a piece around it. After weeks of jamming, David Byrne and producer Brian Eno came in to the studio to start adding arrangements and lyrics to the music pieces.”

Eno counted the rhythm of the song differently than everyone else did, resulting in a distinctive layering of different grooves all at once. On top of this came the lyrics, which Byrne developed as he “sat down and listened to televangelist sermons, pulling phrases from them and crafting them into lyrics.” Put together, “the song creates a trancelike state, capturing the manic monotony of middle-class existence” with both its captivatingly repetitive music (played by the band members acting as “human samplers”) and its words, as Byrne himself interprets them, “about the unconscious, about how we operate half-awake on autopilot.”

Like so many hits of the 1980s, “Once in a Lifetime” launched into the zeitgeist from the platform of MTV — a network that didn’t even exist when the song came out. “Made on a shoestring budget, the video for ‘Once in a Lifetime’ is one of the most memorable of its time.” Co-directed by Toni Basil (of “Mickey” fame), it “played with bluescreen technology, composing multiple David Byrnes on top of a white background or images of religious ceremony.” Byrne and Basil “pored over film of preachers, people in trances, religious sects, and much, much more. Some of these were put in the background, but more importantly, they were used as the basis for Byrne’s dancing.” When the content-hungry MTV launched six months after “Once in a Lifetime” came out, the video went right into heavy rotation. 37 years later, we can look back at both it and the song as “the walking embodiment of all that the Talking Heads were: it’s cutting-edge, it’s strange, and it’s utterly brilliant.”

The Isolated Vocal Tracks of the Talking Heads’ “Once In A Lifetime” Turn David Byrne into a Wild-Eyed Holy Preacher

The Genius of Tina Weymouth: Breaking Down the Style of Talking Heads and Tom Tom Club’s Basslines

Hear the Earliest Known Talking Heads Recordings (1975)

Talking Heads Perform The Ramones’ “I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend” Live in 1977 (and How the Bands Got Their Start Together)

Talking Heads Featured on The South Bank Show in 1979: How the Groundbreaking New Wave Band Made Normality Strange Again

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include 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 Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

Michel Foucault Offers a Clear, Compelling Introduction to His Philosophical Project (1966)

in Philosophy | February 12th, 2019

Theorist Michel Foucault first “rose to prominence,” notes Aeon, “as existentialism fell out of favor among French intellectuals.” His first major work, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, proposed a new methodology based on the “disappearance of Man” as a metaphysical category. The ahistorical assumptions that had plagued philosophy made us too comfortable, he thought, with historical systems that imprisoned us. “I would like to consider our own culture,” he says in the 1966 interview with Pierre Dumayet above, “to be something as foreign to us.”

The kind of estrangement Foucault induced in his ethnologies, genealogies, and histories of Western modernity opened a space for critiques of knowledge itself as a “foreign phenomenon,” he says. Madness and Civilization, The Birth of the Clinic, The Order of Things, and Discipline and Punish examine systems—the asylum, the medical profession, the sciences, and prisons—and allow us to see how ideologies are produced by instrumental uses of language and technology.

Foucault shifted his focus in the last period of his career, after a 1975 LSD trip and subsequent experiences in Berkeley changed his outlook. Yet he continued, in his monumental, unfinished, multi-volume History of Sexuality to demonstrate how modes of philosophical and scientific discourse gave rise to cultural phenomena we take for granted as natural states. Foucault was a critic of the way the psychiatry and medicine pathologized human behavior and created systems of exclusion and correction. In his final work, he examined the classical history of ethical discipline and self-improvement.

We might recognize the remnants of this history in our contemporary culture when he writes, in The History of Sexuality, Volume 3, that “improvement, the perfection of the soul that one seeks in philosophy…. Increasingly assumes a medical coloration.” Foucault described the ways in which pleasure and desire were highly circumscribed by utilitarian systems of control and self-control. It’s hard to say how much of this early interview the later Foucault would have endorsed, but it’s yet another example of how lucid and perceptive he was as a thinker, despite an undeserved reputation for difficulty and obscurity.

He admits, however, the inherent difficulty of his project: the self-reflective critique of a modern European intellectual, through the very categories of thought that make up the European intellectual tradition. But “after all,” he says, “how can we know ourselves if not with our own knowledge?” The endeavor requires a “complete twisting of our reason on itself.” Few thinkers have been able to make such moves with as much clarity and scholarly rigor as Foucault.

via Aeon

Hear Hours of Lectures by Michel Foucault: Recorded in English & French Between 1961 and 1983

Michel Foucault: Free Lectures on Truth, Discourse & The Self (UC Berkeley, 1980–1983)

An Animated Introduction to Michel Foucault, “Philosopher of Power”

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

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

Why Should We Read Flannery O’Connor? An Animated Video Makes the Case

in Literature | February 12th, 2019

Every time a story of mine appears in a Freshman anthology, I have a vision of it, with its little organs laid open, like a frog in a bottle. –Flannery O’Connor, “A Reasonable Use of the Unreasonable”

Why did Flannery O’Connor write? To convert us? The devout Catholic was not immune to a certain apologetic impulse, or a sense of her own purpose as a vessel for divine truth. Or did she, like Greek tragedians, write to inspire pity and terror? “I don’t have any pretensions,” she once demurred, “to being an Aeschylus or Sophocles and providing you in this story with a cathartic experience.” In any case, what drove her may be a less interesting question than what should drive us to read her.

O’Connor wrote, as most great writers do, because she was compelled to write. What we gain as readers is the deeply unsettling, but also deeply pleasurable experience of recognizing our own flawed humanity in her violent, manipulative characters, none of whom, somehow, are ever beyond redemption. O’Connor’s authorial voice does not judge or condemn but exposes to light the flaws that even, or especially, her most respectable characters would rather hide from themselves and others.

By use of what she called “a reasonable use of the unreasonable” she shows murder, contempt, and deception as shockingly ordinary states of affairs, belying the polite fictions of civility and social niceness. Perhaps no setting could better illuminate the contrasts than the piously violent segregated mid-century American South. O’Connor’s “mastery of the grotesque,” notes the TED-Ed video above by Iseult Gillespie, “and her explorations of the insularity and superstitions of the South led her to be classified as a ‘Southern Gothic’ writer.”

The label may fit superficially, but “her work pushed beyond the purely ridiculous and frightening characteristics associated with the genre to reveal the variety and nuance of human character.” O’Connor herself suggested that what set her apart were “the assumptions… of the central Christian mysteries.” Though we need not read her work this way, she grants, there is “none other by which it could have been written.” We might say that her committed belief in the idea of universal human depravity gave her unique insight into the meaninglessness of class and race distinctions. Few writers have taken the idea as seriously, or approached it with more wicked playfulness.

Why did she write? One reason is she “took pleasure in challenging her readers,” as the video explains. But it was pleasure that she chiefly desired to share. We can vivisect her stories, carve them up and seal them in jars labeled with politics and theologies. Yet “properly, you analyze to enjoy,” she wrote. “It’s equally true that to analyze with any discrimination, you have to have enjoyed already, and I think that the best reason to hear a story read is that it should stimulate that primary enjoyment.” Lovers of O’Connor know the answer to the question of why we should read her. Because they take as much pleasure in reading her stories as she did in writing them.

Discover this enjoyment on your own. Hear Studs Terkel read her story “Revelation,” hear Estelle Parsons read “Everything that Rises Must Converge,” and hear O’Connor herself read that 1959 classic of her Southern grotesque style, “A Good Man is Hard to Find.”

Flannery O’Connor Renders Her Verdict on Ayn Rand’s Fiction: It’s As “Low As You Can Get”

Flannery O’Connor’s Satirical Cartoons: 1942–1945

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

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

Becoming: A Short Timelapse Film Shows a Single Cell Morphing Into a Complete, Complex Living Organism

in Biology | February 12th, 2019

From Jan van IJken comes “Becoming,” a short timelapse film that documents “the miraculous genesis of animal life.” He writes:

In great microscopic detail, we see the ‘making of’ an Alpine Newt in its transparant egg from the first cell division to hatching. A single cell is transformed into a complete, complex living organism with a beating heart and running bloodstream.

The first stages of embryonic development are roughly the same for all animals, including humans. In the film, we can observe a universal process which normally is invisible: the very beginning of an animal’s life.

“Becoming” has been “selected at more than 20 international film festivals and won the award for Best short documentary at Innsbruck Nature Film Festival 2018, Austria.” Enjoy.

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via Twisted Sifter

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by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Dieter Rams Lists the 10 Timeless Principles of Good Design–Backed by Music by Brian Eno

in Design | February 11th, 2019

Nearly all of us have heard the dictum “Less, but better,” and nearly all of us have used Braun products. But how many of us know that both of those owe their considerable popularity to the same man? After studying architecture, interior decoration, and carpentry, the German industrial designer Dieter Rams spent 40 years at Braun, most of them as the company’s chief design officer. There he created such hits as the 606 universal shelving system, the SK61 record player, and the ET66 calculator. That last provided the model for the calculator application interface in Apple’s iOS 3, among other homages Apple has paid to Rams.

Rams, in turn, has been complimentary to Apple, calling it one of the few companies in existence that designs products according to his principles. Anyone can sense the affinity between the most enduring Apple products and Rams-designed Braun products, but what are those principles?

You can hear them laid out by the man himself himself in the trailer above for Rams, last year’s documentary by Gary Hustwit, he of Helvetica (the documentary about the font) and Objectified (the documentary about industrial design that featured Rams as an interviewee). The list is as follows:

Good design is innovative. “Design always comes about in connection with innovative technology. How can design be good if the technology is not on the same level?”
Good design makes a product useful. “Good design optimizes usefulness and ignores anything that doesn’t serve the purpose or works against it.”
Good design is aesthetic. “Objects you use daily significantly shape your surroundings and your sense of well-being. Only something that is well-made can be beautiful.”
Good design makes a product understandable. “It makes it easy to understand the structure of the product. Even more, it can make the product ‘talk.’ Ideally, it explains itself best.”
Good design is unobtrusive. “Products that serve a purpose have the characteristics of a tool. Their design should be neutral and leave room for the user’s self-expression.”
Good design is honest. “Honest means not trying to make a product look more innovative, powerful, or valuable than it really is.”
Good design is long-lasting. “In contrast to fashionable design, it lasts many years even in our current throwaway society.”
Good design is thorough down to the last detail. “Nothing should be arbitrary or left to chance. Thoroughness and precision are expressions of respect for the user.”
Good design is environmentally friendly. “Design makes an important contribution to preserving the environment. It conserves resources and minimizes physical and visual pollution.”
Good design is as little design as possible. “Back to simplicity. Back to purity. Less, but better.”

The trailer illustrates each of these principles with one of Rams’ designs, developed at Braun or elsewhere: the T 1000 CD radio, the MPZ 21 citrus juicer, the 740 stool, the 620 chair. Though designed forty, fifty, even sixty years ago, these gadgets and pieces of furniture have stood the test of time. Some have even made a return to the market in recent years of our both aesthetically and environmentally conscious age. You can watch Rams on Vimeo on Demand, and if you do, you’ll not only get to enjoy its Brian Eno-composed score, you’ll learn much more about how Rams designed his most beloved products — and about where he still sees ways to improve them. That holds true even for his design principles themselves: “I always emphasized that they weren’t meant to last forever,” he says. “They should be updated.”

via Uncrate

Paola Antonelli on Design as the Interface Between Progress and Humanity

Saul Bass’ Oscar-Winning Animated Short Ponders Why Man Creates

Saul Bass’ Advice for Designers: Make Something Beautiful and Don’t Worry About the Money

Sketches of Artists by the Late New Media Designer Hillman Curtis

Abstract: Netflix’s New Documentary Series About “the Art of Design” Premieres Today

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include 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 Faceboo k.

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

Neil Gaiman Reads His Manifesto on Making Art: Features the 10 Things He Wish He Knew As a Young Artist

in Art, Books, Graduation Speech, Life, Literature | February 11th, 2019

I think you’re absolutely allowed several minutes, possibly even half a day to feel very, very sorry for yourself indeed. And then just start making art. — Neil Gaiman

It’s a bit early in the year for commencement speeches, but fortunately for lifelong learners who rely on a steady drip of inspiration and encouragement, author Neil Gaiman excels at putting old wine in new bottles.

He repurposed his keynote address to Philadelphia’s University of the Arts’ Class of 2012 for Art Matters: Because Your Imagination Can Change the World, a slim volume with hand lettering and illustrations by Chris Riddell.

The above video captures the frequent collaborators appearing together last fall at the East London cultural center Evolutionary Arts Hackney in a fundraiser for English PEN, the founding branch of the worldwide literary defense association. While Gaiman reads aloud in his affable, ever-engaging style, Riddell uses a brush pen to bang out 4 3/4 line drawings, riffing on Gaiman’s metaphors.

While the art-making “rules” Gaiman enumerates herein have been extrapolated and widely disseminated (including, never fear, below), it’s worth having a look at why this event called for a live illustrator.

Leaving aside the fact that each ticket purchaser got a copy of Art Matters, autographed by both men, and a large signed print was auctioned off on behalf of English PEN, Gaiman holds illustrations in high regard.

His work includes picture books, graphic novels, and lightly illustrated novels for teens and young adults, and as a mature reader, he, too, delights in visuals, singling out Frank C. Papé’s drawings for the decidedly “adult” 1920s fantasy novels of James Branch Cabell. (1929’s Something about Eve featured a buxom female character angrily frying up her husband’s manhood for dinner and an erotic entryway that would have thrilled Dr. Seuss.)

In an interview with Waterstones booksellers upon the publication of Neverwhere, another collaboration with Riddell, Gaiman mused:

…a good illustrator, for me, is like going to see a play. You are going to get something brought to life for you by a specific cast in a specific place. That way of illustrating will never happen again. You know, somebody else could illustrate it—there are hundreds of different Alice in Wonderlands.

Which we could certainly take to mean that if Riddell’s style doesn’t grab you the way it grabs Gaiman (and the juries for several prestigious awards) perhaps you should tear your eyes away from the screen and illustrate what you hear in the speech.

Do you need to know how to draw as well as he does? The rules, below, suggest not. We’d love to take a peek inside your sketchbook after.

Embrace the fact that you’re young. Accept that you don’t know what you’re doing. And don’t listen to anyone who says there are rules and limits.
If you know your calling, go there. Stay on track. Keep moving towards it, even if the process takes time and requires sacrifice.
Learn to accept failure. Know that things will go wrong. Then, when things go right, you’ll probably feel like a fraud. It’s normal.
Make mistakes, glorious and fantastic ones. It means that you’re out there doing and trying things.
When life gets hard, as it inevitably will, make good art. Just make good art.
Make your own art, meaning the art that reflects your individuality and personal vision.
You get freelance work if your work is good, if you’re easy to get along with, and if you’re on deadline. Actually you don’t need all three. Just two.
Enjoy the ride. Don’t fret it all away. (That one comes compliments of Stephen King.)
Be wise and accomplish things in your career. If you have problems getting started, pretend you’re someone who is wise, who can get things done. It will help you along.
Leave the world more interesting than it was before.

Read a complete transcript of the speech here.

Hear Neil Gaiman Read a Beautiful, Profound Poem by Ursula K. Le Guin to His Cousin on Her 100th Birthday

18 Stories & Novels by Neil Gaiman Online: Free Texts & Readings by Neil Himself

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. See her onstage in New York City tonight as host of Theater of the Apes’ monthly book-based variety show, Necromancers of the Public Domain. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Historic Manuscript Filled with Beautiful Illustrations of Cuban Flowers & Plants Is Now Online (1826 )

in Art, Books, Science | February 11th, 2019

The internet has become an essential back up system for thousands of pieces of historical art, science, and literature, and also for a specialized kind of text incorporating them all in degrees: the illustrated natural science book, from the golden ages of book illustration and philosophical naturalism in Europe and the Americas. We’ve seen some fine digital reproductions of the illustrated Nomenclature of Colors by Abraham Gottlob Werner, for example—a book that accompanied Darwin on his Beagle voyage.

The same source has also brought us a wonderfully illustrated, influential 1847 edition of Euclid’s Elements, with a semaphore-like design that color-codes and delineates each axiom. And we’ve seen Emily Noyes Vanderpoel’s 1903 Color Problems: a Practical Manual for the Lay Student of Color come online (and back in print), a study whose ideas would later show up in the work of modern minimalists like Josef Albers.

Above and below, you can see just a fraction of the illustrations from another example of a remarkable illustrated scientific book, also by a woman on the edge of being forgotten: Nancy Anne Kingsbury Wollstonecraft’s 1826 Specimens of the Plants and Fruits of the Island of Cuba.

This study of Cuban plant life might never have seen the light of day were it not for the new online edition from the HathiTrust digital library, “by way of Cornell University’s Library Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections,” notes Atlas Obscura. The book is notable for more than its obscurity, however. It is, says scholar of Cuban history and culture Emilio Cueto, “the most important corpus of plant illustrations in Cuba’s colonial history.” Its author first began work when she moved to the island after her husband, Charles Wollstonecraft (brother of Mary and uncle of Mary Shelley) died in 1817.

She began documenting the plant life in the region of Matanzas through the 1820s. That research became Specimens of the Plants and Fruits of the Island of Cuba, a meticulous study, full of Wollstonecraft’s vibrant, striking watercolors. After making several attempts at publication, she died in 1828, and the manuscript never appeared in public. Now, almost two centuries later, all three volumes are available to read online and download in PDF. They had been dormant at the Cornell University Library, and few people knew very much about them. Cueto, the scholar most familiar with the manuscript’s place in history, had himself searched for it for 20 years before finding it hidden away at Cornell in 2018.

Now it is freely available to anyone and everyone online, part of an expanding, shared online archive of fascinating works by non-professional scientists and mathematicians whose work was painstakingly interpreted by artists for the benefit of a lay readership. In the case of Wollstonecraft, as with Goethe and many other contemporary scholar-artists, we have the two in one. View and download her 220-page work, with its 121 illustrated plates at the HathiTrust Digital Library.

via Cornell/Atlas Obscura

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

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

Wagashi: Peruse a Digitized, Centuries-Old Catalogue of Traditional Japanese Candies

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

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

An Animated Reconstruction of Ancient Rome: Take A 30-Minute Stroll Through the City’s Virtually-Recreated Streets

How Talking Heads and Brian Eno Wrote “Once in a Lifetime”: Cutting Edge, Strange & Utterly Brilliant

Michel Foucault Offers a Clear, Compelling Introduction to His Philosophical Project (1966)

Why Should We Read Flannery O’Connor? An Animated Video Makes the Case

Becoming: A Short Timelapse Film Shows a Single Cell Morphing Into a Complete, Complex Living Organism

Dieter Rams Lists the 10 Timeless Principles of Good Design–Backed by Music by Brian Eno

Neil Gaiman Reads His Manifesto on Making Art: Features the 10 Things He Wish He Knew As a Young Artist

Historic Manuscript Filled with Beautiful Illustrations of Cuban Flowers & Plants Is Now Online (1826 )

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