Discover and Obtain 14,000+ Woodcuts from Antwerp’s Plantin-Moretus Museum On-line Archive

We appre­ci­ate illu­mi­nat­ed man­u­scripts and his­tor­i­cal books right here on Open Cul­ture, adhere although we do to a way more restrained aes­thet­ic fashion in our personal texts. However that’s to not deny the temp­ta­tion to begin this para­graph with a type of over­sized ini­tial let­ters that grew ever larg­er and extra elab­o­price over cen­turies previous. The web archive of Antwer­p’s Plan­tin-Extra­tus Muse­um gives plen­ty of wooden­lower Ws to select from, includ­ing designs sober and naked­ly leg­i­ble, in addition to Ws that incor­po­price a sprout­ing plant, some type of saint, and even a scene of what seems to be like impend­ing mur­der.

If you happen to’re not within the mar­ket for fan­cy let­ters, it’s also possible to browse the Plan­tin-Extra­tus wooden­lower archive by means of the cat­e­gories of crops, ani­mals, and sci­ences. A few of these illus­tra­tions are tech­ni­cal, and oth­ers extra fan­ci­ful; in cer­tain cas­es, the cen­turies have prob­a­bly ren­dered them much less actual­is­tic-look­ing than as soon as they have been.

Not all of the greater than 14,000 wooden­cuts now within the archive would appear to suit neat­ly in a type of cat­e­gories, however when you check out par­tic­u­lar entries, you’ll discover that the muse­um has additionally labeled them with extra spe­cif­ic tags, like “clas­si­cal antiq­ui­ty,” “map/panorama,” or “aure­ole” (the brilliant medieval-look­ing halo that marks a fig­ure as holy).

All these wooden­cuts, in any case, have been made free to down­load (simply click on the cloud icon within the upper-right of the win­dow that opens after you click on on the picture itself) and use as you please. Again within the six­teenth cen­tu­ry, Christophe Plan­tin and Jan Extra­tus, for whom the Plan­tin-Extra­tus Muse­um was named, have been well-placed to col­lect such issues. The Plan­tin-Extra­tus Muse­um’s net­web site describes them as “a rev­o­lu­tion­ary duo.

They have been the primary print­ers on an indus­tri­al scale — the Steve Jobs and Mark Zucker­berg of their day.” And if these decon­tex­tu­al­ized arti­details of the print rev­o­lu­tion strike us as a bit unusual to us at present, simply imag­ine how our sur­viv­ing inter­internet memes will look 4 cen­turies therefore. Enter the wooden­block col­lec­tion right here.

through Metafil­ter

Relat­ed con­tent:

Down­load 215,000 Japan­ese Wooden­block Prints by Mas­ters Span­ning the Custom’s 350-Yr His­to­ry

800 Illu­mi­nat­ed Medieval Man­u­scripts Are Now On-line: Browse & Down­load Them Cour­tesy of the British Library and Bib­lio­thèque Nationale de France

Stephen Fry Takes Us Contained in the Sto­ry of Johannes Guten­berg & the First Print­ing Press

Behold the Beau­ti­ful Pages from a Medieval Monk’s Sketch­e book: A Win­dow Into How Illu­mi­nat­ed Man­u­scripts Had been Made (1494)

Clas­sic Movies and Movie­mak­ers, Ren­dered in Wooden­lower By a Los Ange­les Artist-Cinephile

Based mostly in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His initiatives embrace the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the e book The State­much less Metropolis: a Stroll by means of Twenty first-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.