heracliteanfire

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Cream earthenware pilgrim bottle, flattened globe shape, used for pilgrim's holy water, possibly North African, 18th to mid 19th centuries.

Via the Science Museum. This image is released under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Licence.

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Crookes vacuum tube containing a fluorescent 'flower', for showing fluorescence under cathode ray bombardment, probably made in Germany.

Via the Science Museum. This image is released under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Licence.

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Baby's plate - 'Puff Puff’. Shelley Potteries Ltd, 1910-1916

Ceramic baby's plate, with high sides. Words 'Baby's Plate' and 'Puff-Puff' underneath a picture of London, Brighton & South Coast Railway locomotive emerging from Clayton Tunnel.

via the Science Museum; this image is released under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Licence

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(via Nature's Most Complex Wings in Action! - YouTube)

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Netsuke, boxwood carved with a tanuki (raccoon dog) wrapped in a lotus leaf with smaller one for hat, Japan, 19th century.

(via V&A)

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Snuff bottles, chalcedony, with decoration carved in relief. China, late C18th-C19th. 

One with two toads, a lotus leaf and seed pod, three with crickets and cabbage leaves.

(via V&A)

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Netsuke, wood carved with a snail on a lotus leaf, Japan, 19th century.

(via V&A)

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This is The Seraphim, Lobophora halterata.

I can only assume that some Victorian lepidopterist saw this fairly modest looking moth and was reminded of the words of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite:

"The name seraphim clearly indicates their ceaseless and eternal revolution about Divine Principles, their heat and keenness, the exuberance of their intense, perpetual, tireless activity, and their elevative and energetic assimilation of those below, kindling them and firing them to their own heat, and wholly purifying them by a burning and all-consuming flame; and by the unhidden, unquenchable, changeless, radiant and enlightening power, dispelling and destroying the shadows of darkness”.

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Winter Night in the Mountains. Study (from 1901 until 1902)

Harald Sohlberg (Norwegian, 1877 - 1935)

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Siegfried Berndt

Siegfried Berndt

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'Hothouses I'. Léon Spilliaert. 1917.

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Jean Dubuffet (French, 1901-1985), Cow jar, 1943. Oil on Canvas

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A Fungus (Cortinarius Species): Three Fruiting Bodies R. Baker (active 1887–1906) Wellcome Collection

[heracliteanfire]

Pages of feet from ‘A strange and wonderful little art book, which all painters,  sculptors, goldsmiths, stonemasons, cabinet-makers,  coats-of-arms-makers, weapon-makers, and cutlers will find very useful,  the like of which has never been seen or printed before.  Published by  Heinrich Vogtherr, Strasbourg, 1540'

(via British Museum)

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Pages of hands from ‘A strange and wonderful little art book, which all painters, sculptors, goldsmiths, stonemasons, cabinet-makers, coats-of-arms-makers, weapon-makers, and cutlers will find very useful, the like of which has never been seen or printed before.  Published by Heinrich Vogtherr, Strasbourg, 1540'

(via book; print; book-illustration | British Museum)

[heracliteanfire]

An Apostle. Chiaroscuro woodcut by Antonio Zanetti after Parmigianino. Italian, 1725

(via V&A)