Sea life in glass
19th century glass artists Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka provided natural history museums around the world with lifelike glass replicas of marine life.
The tempest enigma
Around 1508 the Italian Renaissance artist Giorgione painted The Tempest. No-one knows what it means.
Akan goldweights
From the 15th to the 19th century CE, the Akan used sets of ornate statues as a measurement system for weighing gold dust, but also encoding and reinforcing cultural knowledge at the same time.
The Library Cave
On June 25, 1900, tens of thousands of important historical manuscripts were found in a secret room within the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas in Dunhuang, China, where they had been hidden for nearly a millennium.
First vanishing point
Masaccio’s Holy Trinity is possibly the earliest surviving work of art to use a single vanishing point. His work and that of Brunelleschi triggered a Renaissance explosion of mathematical perspective in art.
Christmas cannibals (Part 2)
One of the miracles attributed to Saint Nick is the resurrection of three children before they could be turned into Christmas hams.
First Jesus
The first pictorial representation of Jesus Christ is insulting Roman graffiti that gives him a donkey’s head.
The savages of the Pacific
In 1806 the French artist Jean-Gabriel Charvet premiered one of the first multi-panel artistic wallpapers: it depicted a romanticised and colonial panorama of explorations in the South Pacific.
Mona Lisa, shaved
In 1919, Marcel Duchamp drew a moustache and goatee on a postcard of the Mona Lisa, renamed it with a bawdy French pun L. H. O. O. Q., and called it art. Half a century later, he framed an unmodified Mona Lisa postcard and named it L. H. O. O. Q. Shaved.
Igbo-Ukwu bronzes
In the 9th century CE, a town in what is now Nigeria produced the most masterful bronze artefacts in the world.
Da Vinci and Machiavelli steal a river
Leonardo da Vinci and Niccolò Machiavelli once teamed up to steal the Arno river.
Hoax plaque
In 2004 a plaque commemorating Father Pat Noise was installed on a bridge in Dublin, Ireland. Pat Noise never existed.
Ghost in the painting
Artists sometimes change or improve paintings by painting over old versions. Through careful examination or special imaging, we can sometimes see these ghosts of lost art again.
Baroque perspective
There is a courtyard gallery in the Palazzo Spada in Rome that is designed to fool the eye. It looks like it should be 37 metres long, but in fact it’s only 8 metres in total.
Monet’s haystacks
Monet’s 1890-1891 painting series Les Meules à Giverny captured haystacks at multiple times of the day, seasons, and weather conditions. He did this by painting several canvases at once, swapping them as the day changed.
Computer chip graffiti
The silicon chip pictured here is the central processor from a 1991 Hewlett-Packard 9000 700-series workstation. It contains 577,000 transistors… and a horse?