Abandon all productive time, ye who enter here.
A little adaptation from Dante´s Inferno as a warning if you want to enter, not in hell, but in a paradise of huge scientific illustrations collections. If you click in one of them, you´ll lose yourself in a turmoil of wonderful scientific art, wasting [or investing?] hours of your day.
First one is the well-known Scientificillustration.tumblr.com, with a colossal collection. Anyone can send illustrations for the blog curated by Lukas Large, Natural Science Curatorial Trainee with Birmingham Museums Trust.
Paintings of insects by EH Zeck. He was an entomological illustrator, but the attention to the animals´ environment is a wonderful bonus.
This is an illustration of Pumpkin beetle Aulacophora hilaris (Boisduval) (Coleoptera:Chrysomelidae)
Order reference: pumpkin-beetle
This attractive insect lives its entire immature life underground emerging as the adult beetle to feed on leafy vegetables like pumpkins and zucchinis. Zecks attention to detail and knowledge of insects are evident in his portrait of the beetle and its young stages.
Plant disease illustrations by Margaret Senior. Strangely beautiful.
This is an illustration of Black spot Guignardia citricarpa.
Host: Citrus sinensis
Margaret Senior was one of the celebrated artists of her time. She was an excellent illustrator of Australian natural history, producing the illustrations for a series of highly popular posters for the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service. The Margaret Senior Wildlife Illustration Award is presented annually by the University of Newcastle.
Pictures of Science: 700 years of scientific and medical illustration. From The New York Public Library.
Secunda ossium tabula [Human Skeleton inspecting a skull and in deep thinking]
Content : Made up of the Latin text of Vesalius’s Epitome together with some portions of his longer work, and illustrated with a set of plates engraved on copper by Geminus himself. These are moderately skilful copies of nearly all the woodcuts [from drawings by the painter Johannes van Calcar] in Vesalius’s original book together with a few reduced from those larger and finer cuts which had been collected in the Epitome … Vesalius … complained bitterly, not of the piracy of his text … but of the injustice done to his illustrations by want of knowledge and accuracy in the copyist …
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