Venus physique
Venus physique is a 1746 philosophical treatise by Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, probably printed in Paris, on heredity and reproduction, aimed at learned readers. Its three pictures are small printed ornaments: two near-identical emblems of a crowned shield flanked by curling laurel-like foliage and a hanging tassel, and a third showing a bearded mask with a shell crest, swags of leaves and pendant drops. A designer could take from them the symmetrical, tightly drawn line-ornament style of mid-eighteenth-century French printing, useful for heraldic or vignette motifs.
