463-year-old pictures depict the end of the world

The scientific advances of the Renaissance might’ve propelled human understanding of the world around us forward, but much of Europe still remained deeply superstitious during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. This superstition is exposed in beautiful, eerie color by TASCHEN’s Book of Wonders, a collection of images that originated from the city of Augsburg in the 1550s. Collectors Weekly looks closely at the book, poring through its depictions of strange beasts, burning logs, and bouncing yellow sky-balls to understand a time of “great ambivalence” in which the Protestant populace of northern Europe was consumed by religious antipathy and a sincere belief that these strange signs showed the world was about to end.