This is a paradox in the cocktail of qualities that define sprezzatura — the achievement of eloquence and honesty through deception and concealment.

For the Polish educator Antoni Jażwiński, history was best represented by an abstract grid.

Ox-faced children, elderly women sprouting horns, and cloven minds — all features attributed to Edward Jenner’s vaccine against smallpox. Introducing us to the original anti-vaxxers, Erica X Eisen explores the “vacca” in the first-ever vaccine: its bovine origins and the widespread worry that immunity came with beastly side effects.

Ox-faced children, elderly women sprouting horns, and cloven minds — all features attributed to Edward Jenner’s vaccine against smallpox. Introducing us to the original anti-vaxxers, Erica X Eisen explores the “vacca” in the first-ever vaccine: its bovine origins and the widespread worry that immunity came with beastly side effects.

Angels emerge from avian eggs and a figure climbs a ladder to the moon, in Blake's unique take on the emblems tradition.

Inspired by Jules Verne’s scientific novels, The electric life has garnered retrospective praise for successfully anticipating much of modern life.

The nineteenth-century images collected here concern hatha yoga, the yoga of physical discipline.

This month marks the 200th anniversary of Charles Baudelaire’s birth, the French poet famous for his descriptions of the flâneur: a man of the crowd, who thrived in the metropolis’ multitude. Following Baudelaire through 19th-century Paris, Matthew Beaumont discovers a parallel archetype — the convalescent hero of modernity — who emerges from the sickbed into city streets with a feverish curiosity.

Gathering over 500 prints, paintings, illustrations, sketches, photographs, doodles, and everything in between, Affinities is a carefully curated journey exploring echoes and connections across more than two millennia of visual culture.

Images from Agostino Ramelli's Diverse and Artificial Machines, which despite their detail obscure as much as they reveal.