The great educational pioneer, Jan Amos Comenius, took the further step of
concretizing Campanella’s instructional system in actual pictures and descriptions.
His book Orbis Sensualium Pictus (“The world explained in pictures”) was the
mother of all children’s picture textbooks. First published in Nuremburg in 1658,
it has been used over the past three centuries as the model for more than 200
editions in twenty six languages. The Orbis was intended as a visual textbook for
learning Latin and other languages. It contains none of the occult elements of its
imagery ancestors but is instead a straightforward summary of the world in 150
pictures with titles. The objects in the pictures are numbered and accompanied by
parallel columns of labels and short sentences describing the numbered objects,
thus explaining about two thousand words from different domains (astronomical,
animal. plant, occupations, abstract “notions”).