Subjects & themes

Public-domain science and natural-history illustration, organised by discipline.

• Botanical illustration 135

  Botanical illustration sits where art meets science: a plate had to be beautiful enough to sell a folio and accurate enough for a botanist to key a species from it. From the herbals of the Renaissance to the great...

• Celestial charts & astronomy 120

  Celestial cartography turned the night sky into a navigable map. Star atlases paired hard positional data — the coordinates of catalogued stars — with the mythological figures of the constellations, so a single plate...

• Zoological illustration 92

  Zoological plates catalogued the animal kingdom for an age of exploration and empire. Drawn from specimens, menageries and the occasional traveller's sketch, they fixed the look of species long before photography —...

• Ornithological plates 92

  Bird plates are the celebrities of natural-history illustration — Audubon's life-size birds are the drained cliché of the genre. The wider archive is far richer: hand-coloured engravings and chromolithographs that...

• Entomological plates 92

  Entomological plates render the insect world at a scale the naked eye rarely affords: the iridescence of a beetle, the venation of a wing, a butterfly's life cycle laid out stage by stage. Precision here is...

• Anatomical illustration 92

  Anatomical illustration is the oldest marriage of art and medicine. From the écorché figures of the Renaissance to the layered plates of nineteenth-century atlases, these images taught generations of physicians to...

• Mineralogy & geology 92

  Mineralogical and conchological plates catalogued the inorganic and shelled worlds — crystals, ores, and the spiralling geometry of shells — with a jeweller's attention to colour and facet. This archive holds 92...

• Marine & aquatic life 92

  Marine illustration documented life below the waterline: fishes, corals and the strange translucent creatures of the plankton, many of them drawn from specimens that did not survive the journey home. This archive...

• Historical scientific diagrams 95

  Historical scientific diagrams — of instruments, machines and experiments — are the engineering drawings of their age: the plate that let a reader build, repair or simply understand a device. This archive holds 95...