The beauty of an illustration is what it can communicate. As with great wall art, these drawings and diagrams have been used to bring ideas to life. We take a look at some illustrations that have altered the way we see the world.
1. The Vitruvian Man by Leonardo Da Vinci
Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man (circa 1487) was produced as a study of the proportions of the human body. Da Vinci spent a great deal of time perfecting his anatomical drawings and was the forerunner of medical illustration. It is now such a common image you are likely to see it as a canvas print and for good reason.
2. Waldseemuller world map
Created by cartographer Martin Waldseemuller over 500 year ago in 1507, this map of the world was pioneering. It gave America its name and was the first to show the New World as a separate continent. It was also the first map to envisage the existence of the Pacific Ocean.
3. Diagram of the Copernican system
At the beginning of his book On the Revolutions of the Celestial Orbs (1543), Nicolaus Copernicus drew a simple and elegant diagram to illustrate his theory that the sun (rather than the earth) is at the centre of our solar system.
4. Robert Hooke’s drawing of a flea
Following the invention of the microscope in the 1600’s, new opportunities arose for investigating the world. Along with his intricate drawing of a flea, Hooke documented many illustrations of insects and objects as seen through a microscope in his book Micrographia (1665).
5. Charles Darwin’s tree of life
Darwin was the first to suggest an evolutionary tree of life. As the only illustration in his groundbreaking work On the Origin of the Species by Natural Selection (1859), this ‘tree of life’ perfectly demonstrates Darwin’s theory of evolution.