VISUAL COMMUNICATION HISTORY BLOG

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…

De Materia Medica (medical material) was herbarium by the Greek physician Dioscorides.

The illustrations that adorn more than 100 of the herbal’s pages are captivating on their own. Each accompanies short descriptions of a remedy and how people may prepare it (although these entries may not have actually served as practical guides). Small winged creatures appear above a treatment for spider bites, for example, and a snake and scorpion in battle illustrate a recipe made from dried heliotrope and wine, which was purportedly used to…

An antiphonal from France/​ Burgundy, 1st half of 16th Century https://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/salVIII16/0029/thumbs

A vanitas is a symbolic work of art showing the transience of life, the futility of pleasure, and the certainty of death, often contrasting symbols of wealth and symbols of ephemerality and death. Best-known are vanitas still lifes, a common genre in Netherlandish art of the 16th and 17th centuries; they have also been created at other times and in other media and genres. Common vanitas symbols include skulls, which are a reminder of the certai…

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

A page from a musical score book of enigmatic canons by composer Juan del Vado (1626 - 1691), completed between 1677 and 1679 and given as a gift to Juan José de Austria, the brother of Charles II, for usage in his royal chapel. See/read more here: https://www.emblematica.com/blog/2010/02/enigmas-resueltos.html

When Carl Jung embarked on the extended self-exploration he called his 'confrontation with the unconscious', the heart of it was "The Red Book", a large, illuminated volume he created between 1914 and 1930. Here he developed his principal theories - of the archetypes, the collective unconscious and the process of individuation - that transformed psychotherapy from a practice concerned with treatment of the sick into a means for…

I cannot get over the hierarchical structure in Persian miniatures where (in the absence of perspective) this effect is achieved solely through visual separators such as boxes and rules; often intricately placed inside each other or in overlapping layers - creating complex but very easy to navigate informational systems. And especially the way in which text and image is brought together... Of course, the same principles apply to all Islamic min…