Wonder: The world is stranger up close. - Page 36

Editor’s note

The open room

Wonder begins where familiarity loosens. This edition crosses science, art, language and history to recover the useful shock of looking closely at things we thought we already knew.

Q1473

WonderArt

The Terracotta Army — around 8,000 life-sized clay soldiers buried to guard China's first emperor — was made so that no two faces are quite alike.

Discovered by farmers digging a well in 1974, the figures were originally painted in bright colours that flaked away within minutes of meeting the air after two thousand years underground. Each soldier carries individual features, hairstyles and expressions, as if a whole army had been portrait-sculpted one man at a time for a ruler who wanted his power to continue past death.

Archaeology (Terracotta Army)Read card

Q1474

WonderArt

In a cave on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, archaeologists found a painting of a warty pig dated to at least 45,500 years ago — the oldest known figurative artwork.

Ochre-red and life-sized, it was made by people who reached these islands long before farming or cities, and it predates the famous cave art of Europe by thousands of years. Beside it are hand stencils, the same gesture of pressing a palm to rock that appears on walls across the world. Wherever humans have gone, it seems, the urge to leave an image behind went with them.

Archaeology (Leang Tedongnge, Sulawesi)Read card

Q1475

WonderArt

In the Peruvian desert, the Nazca people scraped enormous figures — a hummingbird, a monkey, a spider — into the ground, some stretching hundreds of metres, only fully visible from above.

Made by removing dark surface stones to reveal the pale earth beneath, the lines have survived roughly two thousand years in one of the driest places on Earth. Their makers could never have seen them whole from the ground. Why they made images for a vantage point they could not reach is still debated — a reminder that art has always pointed at things larger than the artist.

Archaeology (Nazca Lines)Read card

Q1476

StillnessArt

France's 17,000-year-old Lascaux cave paintings were sealed from the public in 1963 because the breath, warmth and lamps of thousands of visitors were feeding mould and algae on the walls.

Carbon dioxide and humidity from the crowds began to eat at images that had survived since the Ice Age. Today people visit exact replicas built nearby instead, while the original rests in careful darkness. It is a strange modern problem: some things can only be preserved by refusing to look at them directly.

Conservation (Lascaux)Read card

Q1477

StillnessArt

In Byzantine churches, mosaics were set with thousands of gold-backed glass tiles deliberately angled so that candle and lamplight would catch them and shimmer as you moved.

The gold was not painted on but fused inside the glass, and each tiny tile — a tessera — was pressed into the plaster at a slightly different tilt. The effect turned still walls into something alive and trembling with light, made for eyes seeing by flame. These artists understood that a picture is not only what is shown, but how the light is invited to move across it.

Byzantine art (Ravenna mosaics)Read card

Q1478

StillnessArt

In manuscripts like the Book of Kells, made around 800 AD, monks turned the letters of the Gospels into dense knots of ornament, using gold leaf and pigments including lapis lazuli carried across a continent.

A single elaborate page could take weeks, worked by candlelight with quills and hand-mixed colours, some so intricate they were later said to be 'the work of angels'. Before printing, a book was not reproduced but grown, one radiant page at a time — an object where writing and painting had not yet parted ways.

Medieval manuscripts (Book of Kells)Read card

Q1479

WonderArt

When it was unveiled in 1886, the Statue of Liberty was the warm brown of new copper; the famous green is a patina that slowly formed as the metal reacted with the air over about thirty years.

Its copper skin is only about two millimetres thick — roughly two coins — yet the thin green crust that grew over it actually protects the metal beneath from further corrosion. When a plan was floated to repaint it during a 1980s restoration, the public objected: the colour we now think of as the statue is really the mark of time working on it.

Metallurgy (Statue of Liberty)Read card

Q1480

WonderArt

Rodin's famous bronze 'The Thinker' exists in dozens of authorised casts around the world, because a bronze sculpture is made from a mould and can be legitimately cast more than once.

This unsettles a common assumption that a masterpiece must be one unique object. With bronze, the artist's original is often the clay or plaster model; the bronzes are all 'real', poured from it under the sculptor's authority. It quietly asks where a work of art truly lives — in a single surface, or in the form itself.

Sculpture (Auguste Rodin)Read card

Q1481

StillnessArt

Gustav Klimt worked actual gold and silver leaf into paintings like 'The Kiss', so the surface catches light almost like the Byzantine mosaics that inspired him.

The son of a gold engraver, Klimt covered his lovers in flat, glittering pattern, letting the figures dissolve into ornament while their faces and hands stay tender and real. The gold does something paint alone cannot: it changes with the light in the room, so the picture is never quite the same twice — a still image that keeps quietly moving.

Art history (Gustav Klimt)Read card

Q1482

WonderArt

Wassily Kandinsky experienced a blending of the senses in which colours seemed to carry sounds, and he came to paint pictures of nothing but colour, line and shape — among the first purely abstract works.

He spoke of yellow as a sharp trumpet and blue as a deep cello, and arranged his canvases the way a composer arranges music, hoping colour alone could stir feeling without picturing any object. It was a radical bet: that a painting might work like a piece of music, moving you directly, with nothing to recognise.

Art history (Wassily Kandinsky)Read card

Q1483

WonderArt

When cheap Japanese woodblock prints reached 19th-century Europe, artists like Van Gogh and Monet were struck by their flat colour, bold cropping and everyday subjects — and their own work changed.

Van Gogh copied prints by Hiroshige outright to learn from them; Monet filled his house with them. Ways of composing a picture that had felt like laws in Europe — deep perspective, careful shading — suddenly looked like just one option among many. A whole tradition was loosened by images arriving, almost by accident, from the other side of the world.

Art history (Japonisme)Read card

Q1484

WonderArt

In 1990, thieves took thirteen works, including a Vermeer and a Rembrandt, from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston — the largest unsolved art theft in history — and the empty frames still hang on the walls.

Under the museum's founding terms, the collection cannot be rearranged, so the gaps are left exactly as they were. The frames wait, part memorial and part hope that the works might one day return. It is a rare kind of display: a museum choosing to show, honestly, what it has lost.

Art crime (Isabella Stewart Gardner heist)Read card

Q1485

WonderArt

Picasso's 'Guernica', a vast grey-and-black canvas of screaming figures, was his response to the 1937 bombing of a Basque town, and a tapestry copy now hangs at the entrance to the UN Security Council.

He refused to let the original return to Spain while the country was under dictatorship. The painting has since become a near-universal shorthand for the horror of war — so charged that the UN tapestry was once covered before a press conference about military action, as if the image itself might contradict the words spoken in front of it.

Art history (Picasso's Guernica)Read card

Q1486

StillnessArt

Tibetan Buddhist monks build intricate sand mandalas grain by grain over days or weeks, then ceremonially sweep them away, pouring the sand into flowing water.

The destruction is not an accident or a loss but the point: the work is a meditation on impermanence, and letting it go is part of the art. Nothing about the beauty was wasted; it was simply never meant to be kept. In a culture that measures art by what survives, it is a quiet, radical idea — that a thing can matter fully and still be released.

Tibetan Buddhist art (sand mandala)Read card

Q1487

WonderArt

Fine white porcelain was made in China for around a thousand years before anyone in Europe could reproduce it — which is why fine tableware is still simply called 'china'.

The secret was a particular white clay, kaolin, fired at very high temperatures, and it was guarded so well that European makers spent generations and fortunes failing to copy it, finally cracking the recipe around 1708. A material can carry a whole trade empire inside it: pots so prized that nations chased their formula like a state secret.

History of ceramics (porcelain)Read card

Q1488

WonderArt

The Winged Victory of Samothrace, carved over 2,000 years ago, shows a winged goddess striding into sea wind — and it moves people despite having lost its head and both arms.

The drapery seems to press wet against her body, the wings still beating, the whole figure caught mid-motion at the prow of a ship. That so much life survives in a broken stone says something about what sculpture can hold: not just a likeness, but force and direction. Sometimes what is missing makes the movement feel even more alive.

Classical sculpture (Winged Victory)Read card

Q1489

WonderArt

Trompe-l'oeil — French for 'deceive the eye' — is a technique so precise that a painted fly, curtain or open door can trick you, for a second, into thinking it is real and three-dimensional.

Artists exploit exactly how the eye reads light, shadow and edges, painting a violin that seems to hang off a cupboard or a ceiling that appears to open onto sky. It is a playful confession about all painting: every picture is a flat surface pretending to be a world, and here the trick simply steps forward and takes a bow.

Painting technique (trompe-l'oeil)Read card

Q1490

StillnessArt

Leonardo da Vinci perfected 'sfumato', a way of blending tones so gradually that there are no hard outlines — light melts into shadow like smoke, which is what the word means.

Around the Mona Lisa's mouth and eyes, this softness leaves her expression genuinely ambiguous: the corners of the smile dissolve, so it seems to shift as you look. Leonardo is said to have built the effect from many almost-invisible glazes. The most talked-about smile in history works partly because it was painted to never quite settle.

Painting technique (sfumato)Read card

Q1491

WonderArt

The oldest surviving photograph, made by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce around 1826, needed an exposure of several hours — long enough that the sun moved across the sky and lit the courtyard's buildings from more than one side.

The blurry rooftop view, captured on a polished pewter plate coated with light-sensitive bitumen, is faint and strange, but it is the first time a real scene fixed itself onto a surface without a human hand drawing it. Every photograph since — every selfie, every satellite image — descends from that patient, hours-long stare out of a French window.

History of photography (Niépce)Read card

Q1492

WonderArt

The gleaming white marble of Michelangelo's 'David' and 'Pietà' came from the mountains around Carrara in Italy — quarries worked since Roman times and still producing marble now.

Michelangelo travelled there himself to pick blocks, reading the stone for hidden flaws before a single chisel touched it, sometimes waiting months for the right piece. The same mountains that gave Rome its temples and the Renaissance its masterpieces are still being carved into the hills, a thread of white dust running unbroken across two thousand years of sculpture.

Sculpture (Carrara marble)Read card

Q1493

StillnessLiterature

A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.

Kafka wrote this to his friend Oskar Pollak on 27 January 1904, arguing that the only books worth reading are the ones that wound and shake us. A book, he said, should not merely please; it should hit us like a misfortune, or like losing someone we love — an axe for the frozen sea within us.

Franz KafkaRead card

Q1494

DrivePhilosophy

What is now proved was once only imagined.

This line comes from the 'Proverbs of Hell' in William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Blake — poet, painter and engraver — trusted imagination as a form of knowledge, not its opposite. Every proven fact, every built bridge and tested theory, began as something someone first pictured in the mind.

William BlakeRead card

Q1506

WonderOcean

A century after the colossal squid was named, one was finally filmed alive in the deep sea: a young, glass-clear individual about 30 cm long, drifting 600 m down near the South Sandwich Islands.

On 9 March 2025, the research vessel Falkor (too) and its robot SuBastian caught the footage; squid experts Kat Bolstad and Aaron Evans confirmed it. The species was formally named in 1925 but had only ever been known from remains in the stomachs of whales and seabirds. Adults may reach 7 m and 500 kg — the heaviest invertebrate on Earth.

Schmidt Ocean InstituteRead card

Q1507

WonderSpace

In July 2025 astronomers spotted 3I/ATLAS — a comet from another star system, only the third interstellar object ever detected passing through our Solar System.

The NASA-funded ATLAS survey telescope in Chile reported it on 1 July 2025. It was moving at roughly 137,000 mph — too fast for the Sun to hold — on a path that will fling it back out of the Solar System. It rounded the Sun just beyond Mars's orbit in October 2025 and had drifted through interstellar space for perhaps billions of years before arriving.

NASA / Minor Planet CenterRead card

Move into another roomDriveFor the next attempt.