“The Childe Rowland to the Dark Tower Came,” an 1859 painting by Thomas Mortan, illustrates a famous scene from an old Scottish fairy-tale, in which appears one of my favorite words: widdershins. “Widdershins” means to travel counter-clockwise, or in the northern hemisphere, in the path opposite the sun. It referred to a leftward-proceeding direction, and […]
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This painting by al-Qazwini (1203-1283) shows a monster from the Gog and Magog legend. The Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and the Qur’an each mention Gog and Magog as either monstrous people or wild places. Their stories evolved, but usually referred to a threatening, beastly pseudo-human group that threatened a righteous (usually Godly) and civilized
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The Mongolian invasions of Japan were famously brought to an end in 1281 when a tumultuous storm destroyed the entire Mongolian fleet. But it was not just the kamikaze or “divine winds” that destroyed the invaders. The Japanese samurai showed a surprising flexibility in adapting their fighting style, working together more than they had ever
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This image shows the moment before one Herman Maestas from Las Vegas, New Mexico, was hanged. In the background, you can see several men who had claimed a fence to get a better look at the event. And this was in 1894, decades after an 1835 law had been passed, which actually limited the viewers
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Happy Indigenous People’s Day in the United States! And what could be more appropriate to acknowledge the holiday than the study published just this month in _Science_ that confirmed the dating of these fossilized footprints — the oldest we have of Homo sapiens on North American ground? Using two new different dating methods, geologists Jeffrey
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This is the stuffed body of the most famous messenger pigeon of the 20th century: Cher Ami. Now his little taxidermied self resides in the Smithsonian Museum in Washington DC, but in 1918, Cher Ami helped save the lives of 194 American Soldiers who had gotten separated from their larger group during the Meuse-Argonne offensive
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This image shows the creation of Pandora, subject of an Ancient Greek myth. Although Pandora’s curiosity was said to have explained the source of all evils for mankind, I think the story does a better job showing how misogynist the Ancient Greek world was. In Hesiod’s work (7th c. BCE), the poet tells how Zeus
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Statue made of Birchwood of the Virgin Mary, with glass eyes. Autun region of France, c. 1130-40.
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If you wanted to feel special in the 14th c., you might have tried to get ahold of objects like these: reliquaries were sacred containers of the holy bodily remains of Europe’s medieval superheroes, the Christian saints. This shoe (suggesting that inside was part of a foot) depicts Saint Margaret just having busted her way
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Behold the Lycurgus cup, from the 4th c. Late Roman Empire. It is the most exquisite example of a glass-making technique used the the Romans to produce a color-changing effect. Viewed straight-on, the cup is green, but viewed with backlighting it appears red – the technique involved blending the glass with extremely fine-ground particles of
This is a near life-size wooden sculpture of the birth of the Virgin Mary with her mother Saint Anne. It comes from a church called Ebern in southern Germany and dates to around 1480. The sweetness of this pair really stands out, especially Anne’s exhausted but happy expression as she rests after giving birth, one
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Hieronymous Bosch, “Third Day of Creation,” (c. 1490-1510). Bosch was a proto-surrealist oil painter from the Medieval Netherlands with a wonderfully twisted imagination. This painting represents the world as he imagined it before the creation of animals. Here, the color scheme (typical for the exterior of tryptichs, which this was) brings out the drabness of
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This wooden base for a small statue features Eve and Lilith, two primal females in Christian mythology. These characters also underlined negative assumptions about women’s basic nature. Eve on the left shows weakness and over-curiosity by consuming the fruit forbidden to her. Lilith, thought to be Adam’s first wife, shows disobedience perhaps arising from her
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This is a photo of the Charles Bridge, spanning the Vltava River in the city of Prague. One of the loveliest Medieval bridges still extant, it was finished in 1402. There is a really neat animation that in three minutes shows how the bridge was built (it actually took 45 years IRL). Unfortunately Instagram won’t
This is the Pont du Guard, an aqueduct bridge made in the first century by Romans who used it to supply a colony where the modern French city Nîmes now exists. Think about the most recent modern cement structures that you have seen which have cracks and crumbles, and it will drive home just how
There’s a famous children’s book called _Everybody Poops_, and this photo might look like some sort of rendition of that. Here you can see birds, horses, dogs, pigs, and rabbits all in the act of defecating. Our own human species is represented in the second row, right next to the donkey. This visual diagram is
Here’s a giant ground sloth skeleton, unearthed from the modern state of Missouri. Sloths like this would have stood up to ten feet tall, which was typical of many of the enormous charismatic vertebrates that populated our planet up until the great megafaunal extinction which killed most of them off in the Late Pleistocene, about
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I think maps are really interesting, and often I think the older ones are the best. This is a picture of the very oldest known map of the world, and it comes from the ancient Babylonian civilization (700-500 BCE). Maps are by nature symbolic representations, and so looking at how the cartographer imagined the space
This is a medieval rendition of Porphyry of Tyre, a philosopher who lived in the late Roman Empire (c 234-305 CE), and one of the most articulate advocates of vegetarianism from Ancient world. Porphyry was renowned for many philosophical contributions, including writing the standard textbook on logic that lasted for over a thousand years, as
View of the Pallisades from the Medieval Cloisters at the New York Metropolitan Museum, where over 200 million years ago the supercontinent Pangea ripped apart.
