I recently found my way over to Rare Book Room via TypeNeu.
There I was blown away by images I found of a book by Giovanni Battista Braccelli (b. between 1600–1650). He was an ‘almost unknown’ Florentine painter and engraver and the book illustrated below book remained obscure until relatively recent times.
A remarkable precursor of the radical artistic movements of the twentieth century, this rare show of visual oddities is filled with fabulous and jocund variations on the human form, constructed from a hallucinatory variety of animate and inanimate components.
— From OctavoThe book, Bizzarie di Varie Figure, (1624) is full of the most extraordinary figures made up of all sorts of different shapes and objects. It is fascinating and brilliant.
All images below are © The Rare Book Room. http://www.rarebookroom.org/
