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

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.