Lovers’ eyes
If the eyes are the windows to the soul, why would you paint anything else? The eye miniature was one of the oddest trends in late 1700s art.
Category: Early modern history
1500 CE until 1800 CE
Learned pig
Before television, people had to make their own fun. So they trained pigs to read.
Love and Wrestling
Mary and William Brewster, passengers on the Mayflower, had five children: Jonathan, Patience, Fear, Love, and Wrestling. Their descendants included Julia Child, Bing Crosby, Richard Gere, Katharine Hepburn, and Thomas Pynchon.
Puzzle cups
Europe has a long tradition of puzzle and prank cups and jugs: to drink out of these vessels you must first solve a mechanical challenge.
All-Joking, All-Drunken Synod of Fools and Jesters
Peter the Great founded a drinking club when he was a young man. Because he was tsar, he took it too far.
The king, the twins, and coffee vs. tea
King Gustav III of Sweden was so convinced that coffee was bad for you that he enlisted two criminal twins to prove his case scientifically.
Inquisition vs. Last Supper
In 1573 the Renaissance artist Paolo Veronese painted a Last Supper that included drunken Germans, dogs, parrots, and dwarfs. He liked it, but the Inquisition had other ideas.
Macaroni hipster
“Stuck a feather in his hat and called it macaroni.” What does that even mean? As it turns out, a macaroni was an 18th century hipster.
Horses vs. ships
In the long history of war, there are almost no conflicts between cavalry and navy. But in 1795, there was. And the cavalry won.
The ancients and the moderns
Is modern thought more advanced than the Greeks and Romans? Most people fall on the side of “duh, of course,” but in 16th century France the debate between the Ancients and the Moderns was fierce.
Rocket cat
In the early 17th century, the German artillery master Franz Helm suggested attaching a bomb to the back of a cat, in the hope that it would run into a fortified town and set it on fire. This sounds like a terrible idea.
The first iron bridge
It’s a bad idea to make a bridge out of cast iron – it’s brittle and doesn’t handle tension well – but the very first major bridge of this type opened to traffic in 1781 and still stands today.
The first vampire
Vampire folklore goes back a long way, but who was the first real person to be described as a vampire? That honour goes to Jure Grando, who died in 1656, and who was decapitated sixteen years later.
Renaissance fart jokes
Poggio Bracciolini was a key instigator of the Italian Renaissance: he recovered or rediscovered many of the Latin texts that would inspire that storied revival. Also, he loved a good fart joke.
Highest heels
Venice, 15th century. It’s a gorgeous city, but has a tendency to get a bit waterlogged, so you wear clogs to keep your clothes out of the mud. Next thing you know, you’re half a metre off the ground.
Build your own magic square
A magic square is a grid of numbers in which any row, column, or diagonal adds up to the same total. They look complex, but it’s actually easy to design your own using the Siamese method.
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