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publicdomainrev.bsky.social
From Comparative Osteology (1821–38) with illustrations by the Italian-born German naturalist Edouard Joseph d’Alton, an artist and art history professor whose students included a young Karl Marx. More of his wonderful images here: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/comparative-osteology
October 2, 2026 at 11:46 AM
linkedculture.org
Albrecht Dürer · The Large Passion: Christ Descending into Limbo

Albrecht Dürer chose one of the strangest and most dramatic episodes in Christian belief to close his Large Passion series, depicting Christ's descent into Hell itself…
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Cleveland Museum of Art | CC0
Albrecht Dürer chose one of the strangest and most dramatic episodes in Christian belief to close his Large Passion series, depicting Christ's descent into Hell itself between his death and resurrection, a moment rarely captured with this kind of raw physical intensity. This is a woodcut by Albrecht Dürer, made in Germany in 1510 as part of his monumental Large Passion series. Christ, radiant with divine light and still bearing wounds on his wrists, reaches forward to grasp the wrist of an elderly figure rising from a sarcophagus, while a crowd of souls press forward from the left under a stone arch, and winged demons swarm and recoil in the upper right, overwhelmed by a burst of heavenly brilliance. Dürer's command of the woodcut medium is at its peak here, using dense cross-hatching to conjure the claustrophobic darkness of the underworld while the explosive halo around Christ tears through it, making theological meaning visible through pure contrasts of light and shadow.
October 3, 2026 at 3:35 AM
linkedculture.org
Albrecht Dürer · The Great Passion: The Deposition

Albrecht Dürer spent over a decade returning to and refining his Large Passion series, pushing the woodcut medium to a level of emotional and technical intensity that had never been…
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Cleveland Museum of Art | CC0
Albrecht Dürer spent over a decade returning to and refining his Large Passion series, pushing the woodcut medium to a level of emotional and technical intensity that had never been seen in print. This woodcut, part of Dürer's Large Passion series, was made in Germany between approximately 1497 and 1510, with the full set published together in 1511. The body of Christ is lowered from the cross at the center of a densely packed composition, supported by several figures while the Virgin Mary collapses in grief at the lower right, her hands limp and her face turned away, with the empty cross and a barren Golgotha visible on the hill behind and a gnarled tree twisting up the right side of the image. Dürer's command of line in this woodcut is extraordinary, achieving the kind of tonal depth and expressive texture normally associated with painting, and the series as a whole marks a turning point in the history of printmaking as a serious artistic form rather than a medium of cheap reproduction.
October 3, 2026 at 3:35 AM
linkedculture.org
Francisco de Goya · The Horrors of War: This is How it Happened

Goya made this print knowing it would likely never be seen in his lifetime, too dangerous to publish under the regimes that had torn Spain apart during the Napoleonic…
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Cleveland Museum of Art | CC0
Goya made this print knowing it would likely never be seen in his lifetime, too dangerous to publish under the regimes that had torn Spain apart during the Napoleonic Wars. It is an etching by Francisco de Goya, plate 17 from his series known as The Disasters of War, made in Spain around 1810 to 1820. A figure in white crouches and twists on the ground in a posture of desperate submission, while above a railing a mass of dark, densely worked figures bearing weapons and ceremonial objects press down upon the scene, the diagonal of a staircase cutting sharply across the upper right. The caption below reads "Asi sucedio," meaning "This is how it happened," a phrase that insists on witness and fact, transforming what might seem like allegory into something Goya presents as plain, recorded truth.
October 3, 2026 at 3:35 AM
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publicdomainrev.bsky.social
October is #BatAppreciationMonth! Here they are being fully appreciated in plate 67 from Ernst Haeckel’s dazzling Kunstformen der Natur (Art Forms of Nature), published in 1904. More about the image, including details of the line-up, here: publicdomainreview.org/collection/e...
October 1, 2026 at 7:48 PM
linkedculture.org
Edgar Degas · Sketches of Café Singers

Why would one of France's most celebrated painters spend his evenings in smoky café-concerts, sketchbook in hand, scribbling down singers mid-song? This is a pencil and watercolour sketchbook page by Edgar…
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Getty Museum | CC0
Focusing on the performer's expression and gestures from several angles, Edgar Degas quickly captured several café singers absorbed in their songs. At the left, one faces to the left, with just the triangular tip of her nose visible from behind. At the bottom, one stands with joined hands. Two black lines form her closed eyes, a curved line her nose, and another makes her mouth. Another singer behind opens her mouth in full song as she gestures with one extended hand. Two other lightly sketched figures on the right face right. At the upper left, a carefully shaded sketch of a woman's head with downcast eyes is probably by another hand. Degas often passed around his sketchbook to allow others to contribute to it. In Degas's youth, his teacher Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres instructed him to "use lines, young man, many lines, both to remember as well as to copy nature." Quick sketches such as these two were vital tools for the artist to record a specific performance he attended or person he had observed as he prepared for a more elaborate painting or print.
October 2, 2026 at 3:35 AM
linkedculture.org
Albrecht Dürer · The Repose in Egypt

Albrecht Dürer transforms a quiet moment of exile into something almost domestic, surrounding the Holy Family with a swarm of helpful cherubs who saw planks, haul baskets, and play among the wood…
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Cleveland Museum of Art | CC0
These eight woodcuts (1959.99.8-15) progress from Gabriel’s announcement to Mary that she would bear the Son of God, to the events of her early motherhood and beyond. This included the joy of sharing her pregnancy with her cousin Elizabeth, Jesus’s birth, and the subsequent arrival of the magi. After Jesus’s circumcision and presentation at the temple the Holy Family fled to Egypt to avoid Herod and stayed there for several years. The seemingly out of place last scene shows a glimpse of their daily life in Egypt as Joseph continues his carpentry and Mary spins wool. The Holy Family is surrounded by angels and helpful putti and are blessed by God the Father and the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove overhead.
October 2, 2026 at 3:35 AM
linkedculture.org
Francisco de Goya · Tale-Bearers--Blasts of Wind, Plate 48

What kind of society had Spain become when one of its greatest painters felt he could only criticize it through monsters? This is an etching and aquatint by Francisco de Goya,…
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Cleveland Museum of Art | CC0
What kind of society had Spain become when one of its greatest painters felt he could only criticize it through monsters? This is an etching and aquatint by Francisco de Goya, plate 48 from his satirical series Los Caprichos, made in Spain in 1799 and printed around 1855. A winged demon, pale and grotesquely human, swoops down from a murky sky and blows a powerful blast of air onto two hunched figures below, their faces contorted and mouths open, while shadowy heads lurk at the edges of the composition, and the title "Soplones" - meaning tale-bearers or informers - is inscribed in script at the bottom. Goya used the fantastical imagery of Los Caprichos to lampoon the corruption, superstition, and social cruelty of Spanish society at a time when the Inquisition still held power, making this print both a work of biting political satire and a landmark in the history of printmaking as a vehicle for dissent.
October 2, 2026 at 3:35 AM
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publicdomainrev.bsky.social
From the early 1400s, a lavishly illustrated vellum scroll (almost 18 ft long!) of the works of English physician John of Arderne, one of the founding figures of modern surgery: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/arderne-scroll/
September 30, 2026 at 2:18 PM
linkedculture.org
Albrecht Dürer · The Man of Sorrows Standing, with Hands Raised

Albrecht Dürer engraved this image around 1500, the very year he was also painting his famous self-portrait in which he depicted himself with the face of Christ, and the…
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Cleveland Museum of Art | CC0
Albrecht Dürer engraved this image around 1500, the very year he was also painting his famous self-portrait in which he depicted himself with the face of Christ, and the resemblance here is no coincidence. This is a copper engraving by Albrecht Dürer, made in Germany around 1500, during the period when he was transforming printmaking into a vehicle for ambitious artistic and theological ideas. Christ stands upright before the cross rather than nailed to it, his wounded hands turned outward toward the viewer, his face lifted in anguish beneath the crown of thorns, while a skull, a bundle of rods, nails, and a die lie scattered at his feet as instruments and symbols of the Passion. Dürer's engraving technique reaches extraordinary refinement here, with dense crosshatching modeling the musculature of the torso and the texture of cloth, demonstrating that a printed multiple could rival the prestige of a unique painting while carrying an image of intense devotional power to far wider audiences than any single work on panel ever could.
October 1, 2026 at 3:35 AM
linkedculture.org
Francisco de Goya · The Horrors of War: What is the Use of a Cup?

What good is a single cup of water when the dying outnumber those who can carry it? This is plate 59 from Francisco de Goya's Disasters of War series, an etching and…
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Cleveland Museum of Art | CC0
What good is a single cup of water when the dying outnumber those who can carry it? This is plate 59 from Francisco de Goya's Disasters of War series, an etching and aquatint made in Spain around 1810 to 1820, documenting the devastation of the Peninsular War and the famine that followed. A woman stands over a cluster of collapsed and barely living figures, holding a small vessel toward one of them, while bodies sprawl across a barren ground beneath a darkened, cloud-streaked sky, the caption below reading "De que sirve una taza," meaning "What is the use of a cup." Goya completed the full series of 82 plates but never published them in his lifetime, knowing they were too politically and morally dangerous, and they were not printed until 1863, decades after his death, making this work one of the earliest sustained artistic indictments of war's effect on civilians rather than its soldiers.
October 1, 2026 at 3:35 AM
linkedculture.org
Albrecht Dürer · Christ on the Mount of Olives

In 1508, Albrecht Dürer compressed one of Christianity's most psychologically charged moments into a space smaller than a sheet of notebook paper, achieving a density of human feeling that…
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Cleveland Museum of Art | CC0
In 1508, Albrecht Dürer compressed one of Christianity's most psychologically charged moments into a space smaller than a sheet of notebook paper, achieving a density of human feeling that rivals any painting of the era. This is an engraving made in Germany, bearing Dürer's distinctive monogram and the date 1508, produced during the period when he was pushing the technical boundaries of the medium to their limits. Christ kneels at the upper right with arms raised toward heaven, where a winged angel descends through radiant clouds bearing a cross, while his three disciples, Peter, James, and John, slump in exhausted sleep across the rocky foreground, their heavy robes rendered in intricate cross-hatched lines that capture the weight of cloth and the stillness of unconscious bodies. The engraving is a testament to what the burin alone could achieve in a master's hands, with Dürer using fine hatching to produce a full tonal range from brilliant light around the angel to deep shadow beneath the sleeping figures, all within a plate of remarkable intimacy.
October 1, 2026 at 3:34 AM
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ashmoleanmuseum.bsky.social
This wonderful 16th-century jar is in the shape of a pinecone.

Jars like this in the shape of pinecones, both lustred and unlustred, were a popular Deruta product in the first half of the sixteenth century.
An earthenware jar in the shape of a pine cone.
September 29, 2026 at 7:00 AM
linkedculture.org
Albrecht Dürer · The Virgin and Child Surrounded by Saints and Angels

Albrecht Dürer closes his Life of the Virgin series with an image that stands apart from every other print in the sequence, depicting not a dramatic event but a…
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Cleveland Museum of Art | CC0
Dürer depicted the scene of the Virgin’s death (1959.99.18) as an intimate one, with the apostles keeping vigil around her deathbed. Three days later they witnessed Mary’s bodily assumption into paradise where she was crowned the Queen of Heaven (1959.99.19). The final print (1959.99.20), which some believe was conceived independently from the series because it falls outside of the typical narrative, shows the Virgin in a domestic setting surrounded by several saints, angels, and putti that celebrate her life-an especially fitting way to end the series.
September 30, 2026 at 3:35 AM
linkedculture.org
Albrecht Dürer · The Large Passion: Christ on the Mount of Olives

Albrecht Dürer was only in his mid-twenties when he produced this woodcut, yet he used the crude medium of carved wood to achieve a density of shadow and texture that…
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Cleveland Museum of Art | CC0
Albrecht Dürer was only in his mid-twenties when he produced this woodcut, yet he used the crude medium of carved wood to achieve a density of shadow and texture that most printmakers of his generation could not match with a burin on copper. It is a woodcut from his Large Passion series, made in Germany around 1497 to 1500, and bears his monogram at the lower centre. Christ kneels in anguished prayer against a pale rocky outcrop at the centre while an angel descends from the upper left bearing a chalice, the three sleeping apostles sprawl in the foreground in various postures of exhaustion, and in the middleground a lantern-carrying crowd led by Judas already winds its way through the gate toward the garden. The Large Passion was one of Dürer's most ambitious early projects, and this scene demonstrates how he pushed the woodcut to rival the tonal complexity of drawing, layering dense crosshatching across foliage, rock, and drapery to create a nocturnal atmosphere almost without precedent in the medium at that date.
September 30, 2026 at 3:35 AM
linkedculture.org
Francisco de Goya · Bullfights: A Moor Caught by a Bull in the Ring

Francisco de Goya spent years obsessed with bullfighting, but what drew him to depict a Moorish bullfighter specifically was a chance to reach back centuries into…
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Cleveland Museum of Art | CC0
Francisco de Goya spent years obsessed with bullfighting, but what drew him to depict a Moorish bullfighter specifically was a chance to reach back centuries into Spanish history and reclaim the spectacle's contested, multicultural origins. This is an etching and aquatint by Francisco de Goya, plate 8 from his celebrated series La Tauromaquia, first published in 1816 in Spain and printed again in this edition of 1876. Against a spare, atmospheric arena rendered in smoky grey aquatint, a dark-costumed figure has been caught and lifted by a charging black bull, his body thrown sideways in mid-air, while two white-clad assistants rush in from behind, one raising his arm in a desperate attempt to distract the animal. The Tauromaquia series was Goya's most sustained engagement with a single subject, combining documentary precision with visceral energy to produce images that treat the bullring not as spectacle but as a stage for violence, danger, and human vulnerability.
September 30, 2026 at 3:34 AM
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gettymuseum.bsky.social
It’s Purrquoise’s world, and we’re just living in it.

In an *exclusive* interview, he touches down on his international travels, his east coast frienemy, and his starring role in Getty’s new season of the If Objects Could Talk podcast.

www.getty.edu/news/purrquo...
Installation view of Purrquoise, the turquoise colored ceramic cat sitting on a gold throne at the Getty Museum.
September 28, 2026 at 8:16 PM
linkedculture.org
Dorothea Lange · "Have Fare Ready, Please"/ Oakland, California

Dorothea Lange spent years photographing America's dispossessed, but during the Second World War the federal government hired her to turn that same unflinching eye on the home front,…
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Getty Museum | CC0
A woman reaches into her handbag as she searches for a bus fare. There is a little boy wearing a hat in the bottom of the frame.
September 29, 2026 at 3:35 AM
linkedculture.org
Dorothea Lange · General Strike / Street Meeting, San Francisco

In 1934, as San Francisco's General Strike brought the city to a standstill, Dorothea Lange walked out of her studio and into the streets to photograph a society under enormous…
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Getty Museum | CC0
> After returning from a seven-month sojourn in New Mexico, Dorothea Lange observed from her studio the increasing number of unemployed workers in the streets of San Francisco. She took her camera outdoors and began to make pictures of groups of men at soup kitchens, May Day demonstrations, and strike rallies. The photographer Willard Van Dyke recognized the quality of this output and arranged a show of the images at his studio gallery. He also wrote a critique of Lange's work of the October 1834 issue of *Camera Craft* that was illustrated with five of her photographs, including this image and a substantially cropped version of *White Angel Breadline* ([2000.43.1](http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/129301)). He explained Lange's motivation for tracking the "drama of human relations": "In an old Ford she drives to a place most likely to yield subjects consistent with her general sympathies. Unlike the newspaper reporter, she has no news or editorial policies to direct her movements; it is only her deeply personal sympathies for the unfortunate, the downtrodden, the misfits, among her contemporaries that provide the impetus for her expedition." > > Although Lange's subject was the masses, she usually picked out one figure or face to delineate clearly, someone who would represent the crowd, a person the viewer could care about. This compositional technique was employed by contemporary muralists, many of them imitating the Mexican model. Lange became skilled at photographing groups so that the scale of background figures appeared uniform and the room between them seemed compressed. Against this flat, shallow space, the individual she chose to distinguish from the multitude was easily detected and his or her magnetic features recognized. Judith Keller, *Dorothea Lange*, In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2002), 18; © 2002 J. Paul Getty Trust.
September 29, 2026 at 3:34 AM
linkedculture.org
Albrecht Dürer · Group of Five Figures

Albrecht Dürer made very few etchings in his entire career, and this is one of them, placing it among the rarest printmaking experiments of the greatest German artist of the Renaissance. It is an…
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Cleveland Museum of Art | CC0
Albrecht Dürer made very few etchings in his entire career, and this is one of them, placing it among the rarest printmaking experiments of the greatest German artist of the Renaissance. It is an etching made in Germany around 1515 to 1516, one of only a handful Dürer produced as he tested the relatively new technique of biting lines into an iron plate with acid. Five figures crowd an outdoor rocky setting: a gaunt standing male nude at the centre, his ribs and musculature rendered with intense crosshatching, flanked by a wizened old man and a turbaned woman on the left, while a seminude woman reclines in the lower right, her head thrown back, near a shield and scattered objects. The rough, slightly irregular line quality, so different from the crystalline control of Dürer's engravings, reveals him actively working out what etching could and could not do, making this print a visible record of one of history's greatest printmakers pushing deliberately into unfamiliar territory.
September 29, 2026 at 3:34 AM
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guggenheim.bsky.social
Several Circles by Vasily Kandinsky, 1926
https://botfrens.com/collections/212/contents/137491
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection, By gift © 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris
September 28, 2026 at 12:14 AM
linkedculture.org
Felice Beato · Photographic Copy of a Drawing of an Execution by Charles Wirgman

In November 1864, a British merchant named Charles Richardson was avenged by a public beheading in Japan, and the artist Charles Wirgman stood among the witnesses…
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Getty Museum | CC0
Photographic reproduction of a drawing by Charles Wirgman, depicting a public execution by beheading, witnessed by a large number of men dressed in traditional garments and military uniform. Also visible in the foreground are three children and a woman, all dressed in traditional garments.
September 28, 2026 at 3:35 AM
linkedculture.org
Francisco de Goya · The Filiation, Plate 57

Francisco de Goya created this print as a direct attack on the hypocrisy of noble bloodlines, mocking the obsession with genealogy that gave Spain's aristocracy and Inquisition their power…
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Cleveland Museum of Art | CC0
Francisco de Goya created this print as a direct attack on the hypocrisy of noble bloodlines, mocking the obsession with genealogy that gave Spain's aristocracy and Inquisition their power over ordinary people. It is an etching and aquatint, plate 57 from Goya's Los Caprichos series, made in Spain in 1799 and printed in a later edition around 1855. A young woman seated at center holds a sleeping or stupefied man in her lap while an older woman reads from a book, likely a record of lineage, and grotesque masked or monstrous figures crowd in from behind, one wearing a tall hat with a large key or scissors perched on top. The title "La filiacion," meaning "The Filiation" or lineage, written below in Goya's characteristic script, confirms the satirical target: the absurdity of claiming pure ancestry when the witnesses to it are fools and monsters.
September 28, 2026 at 3:34 AM
linkedculture.org
Francisco de Goya · The Horrors of War: This is What You Were Born For

The caption beneath this image reads "Para eso habeis nacido," which translates as "This is what you were born for," and it is one of the most devastating uses of…
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Cleveland Museum of Art | CC0
The caption beneath this image reads "Para eso habeis nacido," which translates as "This is what you were born for," and it is one of the most devastating uses of irony in the history of art, spoken as if by war itself over the bodies of the dead. This is an etching by Francisco de Goya, made in Spain between approximately 1810 and 1820 as part of his series known as The Disasters of War, created in response to the Peninsular War fought between Spain and Napoleonic France. A standing figure looms over a tangle of fallen bodies on bare ground, knife in hand and bent forward with menacing energy, while the victims lie sprawled across one another in helpless disarray, the whole scene thrown into relief against a turbulent, darkened sky with no context of place or cause. Goya made these plates privately, and they were not published until 1863, thirty-five years after his death, which means he never expected to see them distributed in his lifetime, making the series an extraordinary act of witness with no immediate audience, driven entirely by a need to record what he had seen.
September 28, 2026 at 3:34 AM
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publicdomainrev.bsky.social
Born #onthisday in 1641, the very aptly-named Nehemiah Grew — an English botanist who was the first to depict the inner structure and function of plants in all their splendorous intricacy. ⠀

More of his images here: publicdomainreview.org/collection/n... #otd
September 26, 2026 at 7:46 PM