"An Historical Chart of Polyhedra"

A beautiful illustration by Ugo Adriano Graziotti.

"The Eighth Wonder of the World: The Atlantic Cable"

This print from 1866 commemorates the completion of the world's first submarine trans-oceanic telegraph cable. It shows the cable connecting the American eagle to the English lion, crossing through the domain of Poseidon.

Saint George and the Pterodactyl

This unusual illustration is by Victorian natural-history artist Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, who also designed and built giant dinosaur sculptures for an exhibition at London's Crystal Palace.

Europan shore

Depiction of Jupiter's moon Europa by Camille Flammarion, 1903. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Fractal cathedrals

But it also happens that recursive structure is fundamental to the history of architecture, especially to the gothic, renaissance and baroque architecture of Europe — covering roughly the 500 years between the 13th and 18th centuries. The strange case of "recursive architecture" shows us the damage one missing idea can create. It suggests also how hard it is to talk across the cultural Berlin Wall that separates science and art. And the recurrence of this phenomenon in art and nature underlines an important aspect of the human sense of beauty.
...George Hersey wrote astutely of Bramante's design (ca 1500) for St Peter's in the Vatican that it consists of "a single macrochapel…, four sets of what I will call maxichapels, sixteen minichapels, and thirty-two microchapels." "The principle [he explains] is that of Chinese boxes — or, for that matter, fractals."

--Computer scientist David Gelernter on the importance of the concept of recursive structure. I'm reminded of the Mandelbox:

Mandelbox test from subBlue on Vimeo.

Lenin's childhood doodles

The kind people at the Wikipedia Reference Desk share some more information about this surreal image, which was drawn by Vladimir Lenin when he was a child:

...a better translation [of the Cyrillic text "Письмо тотемами", "pismo totemami" in Latin letters] would be "letter written in symbols"...
According to the accompanying text in the journal where it was published, this was a letter "written" on birch bark by 12-year-old Lenin by means of pictograms, inspired by the way North American Indians used them (the pictograms have been mistakenly referred to "totems"). It was made for fun, and addressed to some of Lenin's playmates as a part of some game of theirs, in which they were pretending to be hunters. The exact meaning of the message is apparently not known to anybody. The text suggests that it might be a request by children with the nicknames "Stork", "Crab" etc., where these are asking somebody swimming in a lake to prepare a meal for the hunters or else they'll collapse due to starvation (as depicted in the lower-right corner). The letter is preserved in the Lenin museum (part of the State Historical Museum of Russia).

Alexander takes a dive

Medieval illustration showing Alexander the Great's alleged sojourn in a primitive diving bell

Temari

These traditional Japanese craft items (many more images here) sometimes display symmetries resembling the Platonic polyhedra; compare this figure for instance.

The poet's mistress

The ideal of feminine beauty in the 17th century demanded that women have the characteristics that are literally depicted in this illustration from Charles Sorel's The Extravagant Sheperd (London, 1654): teeth like pearls, eyes that sparkle like the sun, eyebrows arched like Cupid's bow, cheeks a-bloom with roses, and breasts like little globes or, as one writer put it, "little worlds of beauty."

A colored version can be found here.

God the geometer

Medieval illustration showing God as an architect, tracing out the world with a geometer's compass.

Curiously, the cosmos in God's hand (as yet without form and void) looks rather like a Mandelbrot Set.

"...also proper a Trilobite between an Anchor cabled and a Davy Lamp all of the First"

The coat of arms of Dudley, England

Pyramid scheme

In the interests of balance, I'll also link this anti-commie comic from the Red Scare.

"Drawing the retorts at the Great Gas Works at Brick Lane"

An illustration from 1821, depicting a stage in the production of natural gas for lighting.

"Three hares sharing three ears, Yet every one of them has two."

According to Wikipedia, this optical-illusion design originated in East Asia and spread all the way to England during the Middle Ages-- picking up a variety of mystical connotations at every turn.


See also the rabbit-duck.

Visual music and digital dreams

Lumia is an art form invented by Thomas Wilfred in 1919, consisting of light refracted through glass of different colors and forms, creating ethereal abstract forms. Wilfred created a device he dubbed the Clavilux, from the Latin for "keyed light". This device was to light as a musical instrument is to sound; continuing the musical analogy, it had a turntable that rotated glass disks like records.

A modern analog to Lumia might be the abstract compositions of the screensaver Electric Sheep, created by feedback between millions of computers "dreaming" in sleep mode.

Electric Sheep screenshot from Wikimedia Commons.

Videos of both can be seen below the fold.

The Last Judgment on stone

The various human and supernatural figures are painted on a slab of agate, the natural pattern of which resembles billowing clouds.

Source.

Dante Illustrations and Notes

Once I found a small, fragile-looking volume on the shelves of my college library which consisted of intricately detailed charts (with some details and text almost too small to read) depicting the cosmology and action of Dante's Divine Comedy. Turns out it's entirely available online in a somewhat larger and less fragile form.Below are a few screenshots; click for larger version.

More after the jump: