Orbis Pictus: Comenius's First Illustrated Book for Children

What Orbis Pictus is

The Newberry Library translates the Latin title Orbis Sensualium Pictus as “the sensible world in pictures”: a book published in 1658 that paired short sentences about the surrounding world with large illustrated plates, one per page. The Public Domain Review recognizes it as the first picture book made specifically for children, and the Newberry Library calls it a revolutionary text for pairing simple sentences about the everyday world with an illustration on every page. The book stated its purpose from the start: teaching children to understand, act, and speak correctly about what was necessary in everyday life.

The author, Jan Amos Comenius

The book carries the name of Jan Amos Comenius, a Moravian educator covered at greater length in the Recap on Comenius and modern pedagogy. Comenius judged the schools of his day slow and of little benefit, and presented his own work as a small volume able nonetheless to summarize the whole world and a whole language, through pictures, names, and descriptions of things. The project was part of his idea of pansophy, a universal knowledge that the Newberry Library sums up in the motto “Omnes Omnia Omnino,” “All Knowledge for Everyone Thoroughly.” Educating young children was not a new concern: Erasmus of Rotterdam had already written on the subject earlier, and the Jesuit colleges with their Ratio Studiorum had built a structured school model in roughly the same period.

How the book is built

The debut printing came out in Nuremberg, in Latin and German; a Latin-English version followed in 1659.

The pages held about 150 plates of everyday scenes, each cut into a wooden block. Comenius believed pictures made understanding easier for young children, and held that teaching should start from what a child already knows.

Practical example: one plate in the book showed an animal next to the sound it makes and the letter of the alphabet tied to that sound, so a reader learned to read starting from a sound already familiar to them.

The method: learning through the senses

Comenius’s pedagogical motto, in the original Latin, called for learning to flow on its own, without force: that is why he held that, in childhood, the senses remain the main path to knowledge, because abstract thought is not yet available at that age. He also wanted the book placed in children’s hands, free to leaf through and look at the plates without pressure, and he openly encouraged them to copy the pictures by drawing.

Structure: between Genesis and everyday life

A dialogue between teacher and student opens the book, and a closing line tells the reader they have now seen, in brief, everything that could be shown. The book moves loosely like the story of Genesis, from God to the world and finally to humankind.

That religious frame, though, takes up few pages: the book gives more room to practical subjects, from weather to places around the world, from plants to animals to mechanical tools, according to the University of Minnesota Libraries.

Spread and legacy in schools

Comenius’s educational ideas were later taken up and expanded by John Locke, the philosopher who also appears in the Recap on social contract theory in Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, and by other thinkers after him. Orbis Sensualium Pictus arrived after centuries in which education in the ancient world had already produced different forms of organized schooling: Comenius was the first to put pictures at the center of children’s language learning, according to the Public Domain Review.