The Most Fantastical Fish Ever Painted: Louis Renard’s Poissons, Écrevisses et Crabes (1719)
In 1719, a Franco-Dutch bookseller named Louis Renard published in Amsterdam what would become one of the most extraordinary — and most debated — works of natural history ever printed. Its plates show fish with nearly human lips, crabs with carapaces like ceremonial shields, a unicorn fish, and even a mermaid — and yet modern ichthyologists have identified the genus of nearly every animal depicted.