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An Archive of Commercial Illustration (c. 1950-75)
Illustrator Zara Picken maintains an archive of commercial illustration from the mid-20th century. So much throwback inspiration here!
The Rise and Fall of Agent Civilizations
The whole OpenAI/Hugging Face story in plain English
The Annotated Encyclical - a Hugging Face Space by society-ethics
Magnifica Humanitas, annotated with AI-ethics research
Angle Ref. Search
Find portrait references by head direction and share the artwork you make from them.
The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts
Thomas Ammann Fine Art initiates the ongoing Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné: Paintings, Sculptures, and Drawings project.
Lily Seika Jones
Illustration for the 2025 edition of ‘The Last Unicorn’ by Peter S. Beagle, published with The Folio Society.
Face of a Bird, Legs of an Eagle: The Hybrid Venus in Medieval Texts of Image Magic and the So-Called Talisman of Catherine de’ Medici
This article examines the imagery of the goddess Venus in medieval sources of astrological magic, focusing on a zoomorphic hybrid Venus characterized by avian features. Furthermore, the article examines the transmission of this motif into early modern printed sources and talismans. The most renowned among surviving items related to the hybrid Venus is the 18th-century medallion known as Catherine de Medici’s talisman, depicting on one side a classical Venus figure, and on the other, a seated Jupiter alongside a hybrid with the head and feet of a bird. In previous scholarship it has been argued that the hybrid figure, interpreted as Venus, derives from Cornelius Agrippa and the medieval magical compendium Picatrix. The study demonstrates that the same hybrid Venus appears in several other medieval sources predating Agrippa and independent of the Picatrix. These sources, explored in this article in detail, offer a new insight into the evolution of the zoomorphic Venus, providing a deeper understanding of the ways in which non-Christian and non-classical astrological iconography was transformed and found pathways within medieval literature. Based on the findings of this research, De sigillis attributed to Arnoldus Saxo, seems to provide the most direct model for depicting two distinct Venus figures within the same talisman. The article further argues that the avian hybrid Venus was a dynamic figure among non-classical hybrids, appearing in a relatively wide range of sources, including contexts where astrological hybrids were a rarity.
New Topographics: photographs that find beauty in the banal
William Jenkins's 1975 exhibition rewrote the rules of landscape photography. Does it have the same impact today?
Cameron's World
🌍 A web-collage of text and images excavated from the buried neighbourhoods of GeoCities.
