VISUAL COMMUNICATION HISTORY BLOG

Flamsteed was born into a prosperous family and was largely self taught as he did not attend University due to poor health. His extensive studies in astronomy resulted in his being appointed the first Astronomer Royal by King Charles II, with the Royal Observatory at Greenwich being built for him to continue his observations of the heavens. Flamsteed was the first astronomer to sight Uranus in 1690, naming it 34 Tauri, as he believed it to be …

Alchemy entered into European popular culture in the late middle ages, with the translation of Greek and Arabic texts into Latin and the European vernaculars. Based on the tenets of the Corpus Hermeticum, a body of texts attributed to Hermes Trismegistus and meant to date to the age of Abraham, alchemy, or al-kimya in Arabic, can be summarized as the attempt to decipher a divine presence in the material world. Hermetic philosophy taught its pr…

Two anonymous beauties from the late 18th to the early 19th centuries. Read more about them here: https://blogs.bl.uk/asian-and-african/2015/12/a-malay-manuscript-artist-unveiled-datuk-muda-muhammad-of-perlis.html

Published over the course of more than twenty years (1751-1777), the 32 volumes of the Encyclopédie include 21 volumes of text with more than 70,000 articles on subjects ranging from asparagus to the zodiac. The remaining 11 volumes contain beautifully engraved plates illustrating many of the articles. The Encyclopédie was the major achievement of the French Enlightenment whose aim, in Diderot's words, was to "change the common way of t…