junktorium

Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Accession Number 14.601

Ende. The Battle of the Bird and the Serpent, The Apostles, The Whore of Babylon, The Beast, The Baptism of Christ, The Woman Dressed in the Sun and the Dragon, The Angel Of the Abyss and the Infernal Locusts, Heaven. Beatus de Girona. 975. 

Al-Qazwini. ‘Aja'ib al-Makhluqat. India, Bijapur. 1570. 

Valenciennes, Bibliothèque municipale, 0429 (409) f.015v . Chansons de Charles, duc de Croyet d’Anchot (17th century)

Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des manuscrits, NAL 2290, f160r. Beatus. Commentaire sur l’Apocalypse.

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"The Tree of Virtues," c. 1250, from The Book of Trees – Manuel Lima’s spectacular 800-year history of visualizing science, spirituality, and human knowledge in symbolic tree diagrams.

Adolf Wölfli

(Amiens, Bibliothèque municipale, fonds L’Escalopier 022)

Philadelphia Museum of Art

This painting serves as both an homage to ‘Abd al-Samad’s lineage and an appeal to his son Muhammad Sharif not to lose sight of his artistic roots. The artist’s inscription tells us that he has painted this version of a famous original by the master Bihzad (ca. 1450–1535/36) from memory as a gift for his son to serve as a model of what is possible, even for an artist in his eighty-fifth year. The work is a testimony to the dazzling verisimilitude that the finest painters could achieve; witness the power of observation and the skill at rendering every minutia. ‘Abd al-Samad was a master trained in the Persian school, where technical virtuosity was prized equally with poetic sensibility.

Source (some): the Wellcome Collection; via spacetravelco; jtotheizzoe

"This rug represents the village carpet-weaving tradition of the Caucasus that was contemporaneously with court production in Ottoman Turkey and Safavid Iran. While rugs produced in royal workshops had flowing, floral patterns, those from provincial weaving centers retained a strongly geometric character. The motif of highly stylized dragons, which are depicted here, gave the name "Dragon Carpet" to this type of rug which was produced in Trans-Caucasia."

Read more: http://www.stephenpatience.co.uk/Essays/Wunderzeichenbuch.html

Bibliothèque nationale de France, Arménien 291, f. 127r (Battle of the Hydaspes). Pseudo-Callisthenes, Alexander Romance. Turkey or Iran, mid-17th century.

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