Science Art | The Guild of Scientific Troubadours

Scientific illustration of optical equipment studying light in the Early Modern period. Sunlight streams through a window and a board containing a series of lenses or apertures, focusing it on boxes and some sort of cutaway wall.

Science Art: From Les raisons des forces mouuantes, etc., 1615.

19 January 2026 grant 0

This is a light experiment from the 1600s, which I found in the British Library archive over yonder. The book, Les raisons des forces &c […]

A woman with short, bushy hair holds a cylindrical device and smiles next to a headline shouting VIOLET-RAYS! above a scientific illustration of a case of electric equipment that promises SOOTHING, INVIGORATING, CURATIVE VIOLET-RAYS, which are ABSOLUTELY SAFE and GUARANTEED.

Science Art: Violet-Rays!, 1917

12 January 2026 grant 0

This is an ad from the April 1917 edition of Hugo Gernsback’s The Electrical Experimenter, which you can read on archive.org here. I can only […]

A scientific illustration of chicken breeds, in the form of an ornate oval frame bursting with proud and colorful domestic birds - 52 of them, to be precise.

Science Art: The Poultry of the World, 1868

5 January 2026 grant 0

Fifty-two breeds of chickens! This is an educational poster from the 1800s, published by L. Prang & Co., Boston, the makers of “Prang’s American Chromos: […]

Scientific illustration of planets drawn to scale.

Science Art: Diagram of the Comparative Sizes of the Planets, 1895

29 December 2025 grant 0

This is one of the 10 illustrations by Dan Beard for John Jacob Aster’s book A Journey In Other Worlds. Well, actually it’s the one […]

A cell, grey and lumpy, sends out white fibers against a black background.

Science Art: NIH- NCI cancer research

22 December 2025 grant 0

An image of a cell, a neoplasm, from the National Institute of Health’s National Library of Medicine, the “Images from the History of Medicine” collection. […]

Scientific illustration of biomechanics of stacked human bodies, using acrobats making a human tower on a beach. They seem to lean forward in an unsustainable way. Numbers and angles on the image show how centers of gravity make this possible.

Science Art: Akrobati, Lokální těžiště a hmotnosti, 2016

14 December 2025 grant 0

Biomechanics, with acrobats. A photo illustration by Karel Frydrýšek. The description, translated from Czech, reads: “Four acrobats, chosen coordinate system, local center of gravity and […]

Scientific illustration of the human hand as a measuring instrument for the constellations of the zodiac, showing their order and corresponding planets and months in a circular chart almost like a hand of Fatima.

Science Art: ORDEN DE LOS SIGNOS DEL ZODIACO, 1614.

8 December 2025 grant 0

From Theatro del mvndo, y del tiempo, which I’ve mentioned here before but have accessed yonder, on archive.org. This is a chart of the human […]

Scientific illustration of a space station from before rockets entered space, a white disk trailing cables like Lovecraftian tentacles, surrounding the reflective petals of a concave, segmented solar mirror.

Science Art: Noordung’s Space Station Habitat Wheel, 1929

30 November 2025 grant 0

Here’s a space station from before the first rocket left Earth’s atmosphere. The description from DVIDS (Defense Visual Information Distribution Service) Hub, where I found […]

Scientific illustration of moths, orange and brown and green and black, pictured as if flying in tight formation.

Science Art: Plate LXXXI from A natural history of British moths, 1872.

23 November 2025 grant 0

These are English moths, of the geni Rhodophaea, Oncocera, Aphomia, Galleria, Melliphora, Halias and Sarrothripa. Each species in this book has a description like: The […]

Scientific illustration of two Hot Air Motors, devices that turned hot air into circular motion. It's a very 1890s-looking ad, with about 8 typefaces arrayed between two different mechanisms with vertical cylinders between metal legs supporting some kind of spinning wheel contraption.

Science Art: New Patent Hot Air Motors…, 1894

17 November 2025 grant 0

This is an ad from the back cover of Science Gossip magazine, a publication which I discovered via Nemfrog. These “hot-air motors” were made by […]

Scientific illustration of the inside of a snake's eye - lens, cornea, retina in black and white.

Science Art: The Ophidian Eye in Vertical Section, 1942

10 November 2025 grant 0

When the snake sees, this is what the snake sees with. The snake in question is Natrix natrix, the barred grass snake. The image was […]

Scientific illustration of a fisher or fisher cat, a weasel relative that hunts in the woods of North America. Brown, sleek, looking down from a branch, curious and intense.

Science Art: Illustration of a Southern Sierra Nevada fisher

3 November 2025 grant 0

This is a mustelid, a relative of weasels and wolverines, called a fisher. The scientific name is Pekania pennanti. They’ve never been very common, and […]

Scientific illustration of RNA and mRNA doing stuff inside a cell.

Science Art:Vergleich der Aufnahme von RNA und modR in der Zelle, 2018

27 October 2025 grant 0

A diagram of two kinds of RNA doing their thing inside a cell (which is converting instructions from DNA into some kind of protein that […]

Scientific illustration of the coiled spirals and twisting arrows of a molecular diagram, hand drawn and colored.

Science Art: Ribbon schematic of the 3D structure of the protein triose phosphate isomerase

20 October 2025 grant 0

Jane Richardson drew this by hand and then colored it in back in 1981. It’s a protein molecule, or a diagram of how things move […]

Scientific illustration of a spiral galaxy snapped by a space telescope, a yellow and blue spiral whirling against the blackness of space, with a bonus image of an asteroid moving much closer to Earth off to the right side, visible as four thin, colored lines: snapped when the telescope took four different colored exposures.

Science Art: Yellow and blue, old and new, 2025

13 October 2025 grant 0

This is a photo from 10 days ago of stars millions of light-years away (so the picture is of things long, long before October 3). […]