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.
Today (January 22, 2023) marks the lunar New Year in Chinese culture, marked by many festivities and foods as the celebrants hope to usher in a year of prosperity and happiness. This reel and the following images show the New Year Lion Dance, an ancient tradition wherein people (often martial artists from a local school)
Ikkyu (d 1481) was a famous Zen monk. Since Zen Buddhism focuses on getting practitioners to think outside the box, it shouldn’t be surprising that he was highly unorthodox. Fond of drinking and attending brothels, Ikkyu critiqued many Zen leaders of his day for getting too caught up in propriety and material possessions. He eventually
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The dome above the mirhab in the Mosque-Cathedral of Cordova, 965 CE. The octagonal-faceted dome is worked with gold and crafted with some of the finest mosaic tile-work in the world. The mirhab oriented Spanish Muslims to the direction of prayer. The fact that it was funded with gold from the Christian Byzantine Empire illustrates
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This illustration from a French _Book of Hours_ dating c. 1475 depicts a bleeding Eucharist wafer that medieval people considered miraculous. It even has a name: “the Sacred Bleeding Host of Dijon.” Medieval people were spellbound by miraculous bleeding communion wafers such as this one, but there was an ugly underside to this devotion: it
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This 10th c. sandstone relief depicts the Hindu goddess Kali – the Goddess of time, destruction, sexuality, salvation, and protection. She has a horrifying image – bloody fangs, belt of human hands, necklace of skulls, with eyes bright red and skin blue or black. This appearance would have represented a completely uncontained female, something wholly
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