Nautilus Oval Card

During the Victorian era, disembodied hands were commonly used in jewelry, greeting cards, and homewares. They symbolize love, strength and fidelity. Chiromancy was popular during the time, which means hands might have been seen as possessing intimate insight into a person.

Nautilus are strange, prehistoric creatures. The earliest nautilus fossils date back hundreds of millions of years ago, to the Triassic Period, and closely resemble today’s nautilus species.

They are living fossils, a link to a lost world. Their spiral shells are made up of many internal chambers, the largest of which contains the living body of the nautilus. As the nautilus ages, it forms a new chamber to house its growing body, leaving behind a successively smaller series of chambers. In doing so, each nautilus holds in its shell a record of its past selves, a home perpetually outgrown, but never abandoned.

Notes About the Artwork

Source Print

Mollusques

Artist: Georg Wolfgang Knorr

From: Deliciae naturae selectae, oder, Auserlesenes Natüralien-Cabinet welches aus den drey Reichen der Natur zeiget pt. 1

History

This beautiful set of Nautilus specimens, is part of Knorr's masterful book, which featured a collection of specimens taken from cabinets of curiosities in Nuremberg.

1766-1767