When the Olympic Games included competitions in architecture, painting, sculpture, literature, and music

Jean Jacoby was a Luxembourgish painter; Alex Diggelmann, a Swiss poster artist; the Danish Josef Petersen was a writer; the…

Cesare Borgia, Machiavelli’s model for his Renaissance prince and alleged inspiration for Leonardo’s face of Christ

Cesare Borgia, commonly known as the Duke of Valentinois, gained his state through his father’s fortune, and lost it with…

The Colossus of Dionysus and the kouroi of Flerio, Greek statues from the 6th century B.C. that remain unfinished in the quarries of Naxos.

The island of Naxos is the largest of the Cyclades in extension, famous and coveted since ancient times for its…

The Chartres Cathedral’s great labyrinth

About 80 kilometers southwest of Paris stands the city of Chartres, one of whose main cultural attractions is its Gothic…

The strange and controversial prehistoric ‘sorcerer’ of the Cave of the Trois Frères

Very close to the French town of Montesquieu-Avantés, in the Midi-Pyrénées region, and to the Tuc d’Audoubert cave with its…

The scientist who captured the Russian Empire in colour photographs before they were invented

Photography has improved so much, technologically speaking, that today we see images from only twenty years ago and they almost…

The wrought iron bar chain that saved the Amiens Cathedral from collapsing

The Amiens Cathedral, listed as a Historical Monument in 1882 and included in the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1981,…

The ancient sculptors of the stone heads and potbellies of Monte Alto, Guatemala, knew the magnetic properties of the rocks

On February 1976 archaeologists found a sculpted turtle head with magnetic properties in the ceremonial center of Izapa in the…

How Galileo Galilei made calculations for the Statue of Philip IV in Madrid

Does a sculptor have to resort to mathematics to make a statue? Moreover, would he need a wise man like…

World’s oldest portrait, carved in ivory 26,000 years ago

Near the Czech town of Dolní Věstonice in Moravia is the archaeological site of the same name. A site that,…