This has been my favourite portrait on Wikipedia for a while. I found out about the guy depicted, John Mandeville, through reading about the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary and the history of cotton. According to Mandeville,
There grew there [India] a wonderful tree which bore tiny lambs on the endes of its branches. These branches were so pliable that they bent down to allow the lambs to feed when they are hungrie.
That paragraph itself is pretty great. I thought the accompanying illustration of the little lambs sprouting from the plant was good, but then I clicked through to Mandeville’s article:
Ridiculous or ridiculously cool? You decide.
very cool, I heard of Madeleville before.