The Purge of Discontinuity

Living Made Easy - Revolving Hat

Which by a slight touch presents its Wearer with, Eye-Glass, Cegar, Scent-Box, Spectacles, Hearing-Trumpet, &c. &c. without the intolerable trouble of holding them.
London. Pub'd by T McLean, 26 Haymarket. 1830
(via Wellcome Library)
[image updated December 2012]

Woodblock print by Yoshitoshi ~1890 from Tsuru Gallery's
One Hundred Views of the Moon exhibition. [via]

W. Swanenburg.. Anatomical theater in Leiden, engraving (after drawing by Woudanus), 1610. I don't believe this is among any of the online collections of medical images I've seen except as a thumbnail. The engraving was apparently sold as a souvenir at the University of Leiden - "The well-dressed men and women touring the dissection hall ... show that the upper classes of 17th-century Europe were interested in anatomy". The best version is at Art-bin.
[addit: Dec 2012. There is definitely a bigger/better version online these days if you look!]

The above 2 images (unrelated) were snagged from blind trawling in the German Pictura Paedagogica Online website - I love these huge image databases but despite having some excellent rare book illustrations and prints I find it next to impossible to work out artist /author /date /publication details. There's probably a simplicity to it that my brain doesn't quite follow.

This is a detail from an early 17th century map of Holland/Friesland by Claes Jansz Visscher (aka Piscator) who incidentally was an originator of the Leo Belgicus curiosity. The map this came from is 7Mb and was found at the University of Amsterdam Library - somewhere in here.
[360kb version of whole map]

This sketch comes from the Designing the Decor - French Drawings from the 18th Century exhibition at the Museu Calouste Gulbenkian in Portugal (in english). The bad news is that the image was saved last week without details, and the museum exhibition has now finshed. I haven't been able to get the exhibition site to load in the last 2 days - you may have more luck - it had some really quite excellent prints. Perhaps the portuguese section might work?? Anyway, there's some nice things around on their website.

This is also from the Univ. Amsterdam . 'Het vermakelijk Harlikein-spel'
'The Harlequin Game', after the Italian commedia dell'arte genre.

A scattered, but interesting, bunch indeed.