A Kunstkammer of objects found inside paintings, and the worlds they carry with them.https://thingsinworlds.com/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/161-ruysch_flower_still_life/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/161-ruysch_flower_still_life/Halfway up the stem of one of Rachel Ruysch's flowers, a caterpillar is quietly crawling. The bouquet is already being eaten alive. Ruysch was the daughter of Frederik Ruysch, the Amsterdam anatomy professor who kept a private museum of preserved specimens. She grew up drawing from that collection of frozen death. Every insect in every one of her flower paintings is a specific species she knew by name. The Dutch called this vanitas. No matter how perfect the bouquet, something is already at work on it. Now at Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo @toledomuseumTue, 10 Jun 2025 22:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/160-courbet_burial_ornans/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/160-courbet_burial_ornans/In the front right of Courbet's Burial at Ornans, a hunting dog looks casually back at the viewer. In academic Salon painting a dog was allowed in only if it stood for something, usually loyalty or faithful mourning. Courbet's dog stands for nothing. That was the scandal at the 1850 Salon. Courbet had painted a real village funeral at the six-metre scale convention reserved for history painting. The dog is the manifesto. Ordinary life deserves the great scale, and it needs no allegory to earn it. Now at Musée d'Orsay, Paris @museeorsayMon, 09 Jun 2025 22:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/159-raphael_school_athens/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/159-raphael_school_athens/Raphael painted The School of Athens between 1509 and 1511 in the Stanza della Segnatura at the Vatican. Every ancient philosopher is portrayed as a specific person from Raphael's Rome. Plato is Leonardo. Heraclitus, the sulking figure on the steps, is Michelangelo. Euclid demonstrating a theorem is Bramante. Raphael painted himself at the far right, looking out at us. Now at the Vatican Museums. Now at Vatican Museums, Vatican City @vaticanmuseumsSun, 08 Jun 2025 22:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/157-rublev_trinity/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/157-rublev_trinity/Andrei Rublev was a Russian monk who painted around 1425. The Trinity is the visit of three angels to Abraham at Mamre in Genesis — but Rublev arranged them as a perfect circle around a central chalice, using pure geometry to argue for the doctrine of the Trinity. It is considered the greatest surviving Russian icon. Now at the Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. Now at Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow @tretyakov_galleryFri, 06 Jun 2025 22:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/156-behz%C4%81d_seduction_yusuf/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/156-behz%C4%81d_seduction_yusuf/Kamāl ud-Dīn Behzād was the greatest painter of the Timurid court at Herat. His illustration for the Yusuf and Zulaykha story shows Zulaykha chasing Yusuf through a palace whose stairs, doors and levels don't fit together — a lattice of geometric fantasy. It's used as a demonstration of the Sufi idea that lust makes the world illegible. Now at the National Library of Egypt, Cairo. Now at National Library of Egypt, Cairo @national_library_of_egyptThu, 05 Jun 2025 22:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/155-hasan_squirrels_chinar_tree/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/155-hasan_squirrels_chinar_tree/Abu'l Hasan was Mughal court painter under Emperor Jahangir. He signed and dated a folio of squirrels in a chinar tree around 1610. Half of the painting is squirrels — an entire family of them scattered through the branches. In the lower half, a small figure of a boy is climbing the tree to catch one. Jahangir gave Abu'l Hasan the title 'Nadir al-Zaman' — Wonder of the Age. Now at the British Library, London. Now at British Library, London @britishlibraryWed, 04 Jun 2025 22:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/154-tito_signs_zodiac_aries/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/154-tito_signs_zodiac_aries/Diego Quispe Tito was an Indigenous Andean painter of the Cusco School. In 1681 he painted a series of the twelve signs of the zodiac inside Cusco Cathedral, replacing the Mediterranean animals with local Andean equivalents where possible. He signed his name and marked it with 'Yndio' (Indigenous) — a rare visible signature of Indigenous authorship in colonial religious art. Still in Cusco Cathedral. Now at Cusco Cathedral, Cusco @arzobispadocuscoTue, 03 Jun 2025 22:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/153-kuan_travelers_among_mountains_streams/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/153-kuan_travelers_among_mountains_streams/Fan Kuan painted around the year 1000, in the Northern Song. His signature was hidden in the leaves for eight centuries. The cliff face fills more than two thirds of the picture — Fan Kuan had lived as a hermit in the mountains and painted them the way they actually felt to a person standing beneath them. Down in the bottom right, almost lost in the trees, a caravan of muleteers is moving along a stream. Once you see them, you can't unsee how big the mountain is. Now at the National Palace Museum, Taipei. Now at National Palace Museum, Taipei @national_palace_museumMon, 02 Jun 2025 22:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/152-rubens_descent_cross/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/152-rubens_descent_cross/Rubens painted the Descent from the Cross for Antwerp Cathedral between 1611 and 1614. The whole picture is organised around one white linen shroud that winds diagonally down from top-right — nine figures work as a single spiralling motion around Christ's body. Mary Magdalene at the bottom reaches up to steady his foot. John the Evangelist, in red, catches Christ's arm on his shoulder. Above, the men still on the ladder hold the shroud's upper corners. It is still in the Cathedral of Our Lady, Antwerp. Now at Cathedral of Our Lady, Antwerp @dekathedraalSun, 01 Jun 2025 22:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/151-vigee_lebrun_self_portrait_julie/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/151-vigee_lebrun_self_portrait_julie/Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun was Marie Antoinette's favourite portraitist. She painted herself here holding her six-year-old daughter Julie in her lap, both of them laughing, Julie's small arm around her mother's neck. When it was shown at the Salon of 1787, critics attacked the painting on three grounds at once: the pose was too informal (mothers of quality did not embrace their children in public portraits), the artist wasn't wearing a wig, and — worst — Vigée Le Brun's lips were open in a smile that showed her teeth. She replied that her teeth were the healthy teeth of a rational Enlightenment woman. Two years later she fled Paris the night her friend the queen was arrested. She lived to 86. Now at Musée du Louvre, Paris @museelouvreSat, 31 May 2025 22:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/150-bocklin_isle_of_dead/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/150-bocklin_isle_of_dead/Arnold Böcklin painted five versions of this scene between 1880 and 1886, at the request of a widow, Marie Berna, who had asked for 'a picture to dream over.' In the first version there is only the boat and the rower approaching an island of cypress trees. Marie Berna asked for a small figure in white to be added — a soul. In the third version, Böcklin added the coffin at the soul's feet. The painting became one of the most reproduced images of the late 19th century. Freud had a print in his Vienna study. Hitler owned the third version. Rachmaninoff wrote a symphonic poem after it. Now at Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin @staatlichemuseenzuberlinFri, 30 May 2025 22:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/149-snyders_fish_stall/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/149-snyders_fish_stall/Frans Snyders painted enormous still lifes of Antwerp market stalls: fish, game, fruit. His fish paintings are so anatomically accurate that modern ichthyologists have used them to identify over 30 species of North Sea fish by fin, tail and scale — turbot, cod, ray, eel, dogfish, herring, garfish, and species now regional or extinct. Snyders painted from real specimens laid out in his Antwerp studio. Rubens (who lived a few streets away) sometimes commissioned Snyders to paint the animal still lifes for Rubens's own compositions. This Hermitage version is one of the largest at 210 × 341 cm. Now at State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg @hermitage_museumThu, 29 May 2025 22:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/148-homer_snap_the_whip/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/148-homer_snap_the_whip/Nine barefoot boys play 'snap the whip' outside a one-room schoolhouse in the Catskills — a game where a line of children run holding hands, and the leader suddenly changes direction, whipping the end child off their feet. At the far end, one boy has fallen. He is the only one wearing shoes — and his smooth leather soles are what made him lose his footing on the wet ground. Barefoot meant rural, poor, unshod in summer grass. Shoes meant a family already halfway to town. The whole American mood of 1872 is in that detail: rural childhood ending, industrialisation pulling boys into New England factories, one shoe at a time. Now at Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio @butlerartmuseumWed, 28 May 2025 22:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/147-payag_shahjahan_persian/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/147-payag_shahjahan_persian/Shah Jahan receives the Persian ambassador in a durbar at his Agra palace. The scene fills the page: dozens of nobles arranged in strict hierarchy around the emperor, who sits on a jewelled throne. Every one of the 40+ courtiers is a specific individual — Mughal painters worked from portrait studies (called shabih) kept on file, so each face is a real man of Shah Jahan's court, identifiable by name. It is an official court roster in painted form. Payag was Shah Jahan's favourite artist for these events. The book that contains this folio, the Padshahnama, is one of the most extraordinary manuscripts of the seventeenth century. Now at Chester Beatty Library, Dublin @chester_beatty_dublinTue, 27 May 2025 22:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/146-bronzino_lucrezia_panciatichi/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/146-bronzino_lucrezia_panciatichi/Lucrezia Panciatichi wears a heavy gold necklace across her chest. Look at the links closely: each link is a tiny letter. Together they read AMOUR DURE SANS FIN — French for 'love endures without end'. It was almost certainly a wedding gift from her husband Bartolomeo Panciatichi, a wealthy Florentine banker who commissioned this portrait along with his own from Bronzino. The pair are hung together at the Uffizi. Bronzino painted the letters so precisely you can read them from three metres away. Lucrezia was 24. She died at 55. Now at Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence @uffizigalleriesMon, 26 May 2025 22:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/145-kroyer_hip_hip_hurrah/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/145-kroyer_hip_hip_hurrah/Peder Severin Krøyer painted this from memory of a specific July afternoon in 1884, when the Skagen Painters and their friends gathered in Michael and Anna Ancher's garden for a lunch that ended in champagne. Every figure is a real person — Anna Ancher on the right, her husband Michael standing, Krøyer's wife Marie at the back, the writer Holger Drachmann and his family, the painter Christian Krohg. It took Krøyer four years to finish it: he wanted to capture the specific quality of the Skagen midsummer light. The Gothenburg museum bought it in 1902. Now at Göteborgs konstmuseum, Gothenburg @goteborgs_konstmuseumSun, 25 May 2025 22:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/144-kuniyoshi_tokaido_cats/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/144-kuniyoshi_tokaido_cats/Utagawa Kuniyoshi loved cats. He kept many, drew them constantly, and produced dozens of woodblock prints of them. This one is his masterpiece of feline satire: 55 cats arranged across the sheet, each representing one of the 53 post stations of the Tōkaidō highway from Edo to Kyoto plus the start and end points. The joke works because each cat's pose or activity puns on the syllables of a town name. Modern Japanese speakers still work through the puns as a game. Kuniyoshi drew this to bypass a Tokugawa ban on prints of courtesans and kabuki actors. Cats were legal. Now at Ota Memorial Museum of Art, Tokyo @ota_memorial_museumSat, 24 May 2025 22:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/143-vereshchagin_apotheosis_war/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/143-vereshchagin_apotheosis_war/Vasily Vereshchagin was a Russian battle painter who had served in the tsar's army in Central Asia. He painted this after seeing similar mounds of skulls in the aftermath of Ottoman raids. The picture shows a pyramid of human skulls in a scorched landscape, circled by crows. The frame is inscribed in Russian: 'Dedicated to all great conquerors — past, present, and to come.' It is one of the most explicit anti-war statements in nineteenth- century painting. Vereshchagin died in 1904 aboard the battleship Petropavlovsk when it was sunk by a Japanese mine at Port Arthur. He had gone to paint the Russo-Japanese War. Now at State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow @tretyakovgalleryFri, 23 May 2025 22:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/142-raeburn_skating_minister/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/142-raeburn_skating_minister/The Reverend Robert Walker, minister of the Canongate Kirk in Edinburgh, was a founding member of the Edinburgh Skating Club — the first ice-skating society in Britain. Raeburn painted him on Duddingston Loch outside the city, arms crossed in front of his body, gliding on one leg. The crossed-arms pose was the standard Enlightenment posture of scientific composure — the same pose contemporary anatomists were painted in. Raeburn was placing a rational Presbyterian minister onto the frozen loch as an image of Enlightenment leisure. The painting was almost unknown until the National Gallery of Scotland bought it in 1949. It is now the most reproduced Scottish painting in existence. Now at Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh @nationalgalleriesThu, 22 May 2025 22:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/141-wang_ximeng_thousand_li/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/141-wang_ximeng_thousand_li/Wang Ximeng was 18. He completed this 11.9-metre-long silk scroll in six months in 1113, working under the personal tutelage of Emperor Huizong. He died shortly after, at age 20 or 23. Nobody knows why. The scroll uses ground malachite and azurite for the blue-green mountains — hugely expensive pigments only available at the imperial court. The colours still glow 900 years later. It is one of the greatest landscape paintings in Chinese history, made by a teenager who never painted anything else that survived. Now at Palace Museum, Beijing, Beijing.Wed, 21 May 2025 22:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/140-ravivarma_damayanti_swan/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/140-ravivarma_damayanti_swan/Raja Ravi Varma was the first Indian painter to work in the Western academic oil-on-canvas tradition. He painted Hindu mythology in the naturalistic style of European history painting. This is the moment from the Mahabharata where Princess Damayanti of Vidarbha, alone in her garden, is approached by a magical golden swan who has flown from King Nala to tell her about him. She will fall in love with Nala without ever meeting him. Ravi Varma's paintings entered mass reproduction as lithographs, and became the visual template for how Indians would picture their own gods. Now at Sri Chitra Art Gallery, Thiruvananthapuram @sri_chitra_art_galleryTue, 20 May 2025 22:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/139-leyster_proposition/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/139-leyster_proposition/A man leans over a woman, offering her a handful of gold coins. She keeps sewing by the light of a single oil lamp, not looking at him. In seventeenth-century Dutch genre painting the offer of coins for sex was a stock joke: the woman always eventually turns and smiles. Judith Leyster painted the woman refusing. It is unique. The subject was so unusual that for centuries the painting was reattributed to male painters (Frans Hals, Gerard van Honthorst); only in 1928 was it firmly returned to Leyster. She was the first Dutch woman admitted to the Haarlem painters' guild. Now at Mauritshuis, The Hague @mauritshuisMon, 19 May 2025 22:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/138-piero_urbino_diptych/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/138-piero_urbino_diptych/Federico da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino, lost his right eye and the bridge of his nose in a tournament in 1450. For the rest of his life he was painted only in left profile — never full face, never right side. His nose in every surviving portrait bears the same distinctive concave bridge, faithfully painted by Piero. His wife Battista Sforza, on the facing panel, is painted in matching left profile so that they gaze at each other across the frame. She was 26 when she died in childbirth. Piero painted her portrait posthumously from a death mask. Now at Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence @uffizigalleriesSun, 18 May 2025 22:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/137-cole_oxbow/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/137-cole_oxbow/Thomas Cole painted the view from the summit of Mount Holyoke in Massachusetts, looking down at a bend in the Connecticut River. The composition splits diagonally along the river. The upper-left half is untouched American wilderness under a black storm sky. The lower-right half is cultivated New England farmland under sunshine. Cole was arguing, without an argument: the American West was choosing between two futures. The debate was already happening in 1836. In the middle distance, a tiny self-portrait of the painter with his easel is visible, sitting on the ridge between the two. Now at Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York @metmuseumSat, 17 May 2025 22:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/136-mucha_slav_epic/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/136-mucha_slav_epic/Alphonse Mucha spent 18 years painting a cycle of 20 monumental canvases about the history of the Slavic peoples. He funded it with his fees from Parisian poster commissions for Sarah Bernhardt. The first canvas shows a Slavic tribe hiding at night from a raid by Germanic invaders. In the foreground, a couple crouches — a man and a woman — staring out at the viewer, their eyes wide with terror. Mucha painted the pupils so that they follow the viewer no matter where you stand. The Slav Epic was mostly forgotten under Communism. It was finally shown in Prague in 2012. Now at National Gallery Prague, Prague @ngpragueFri, 16 May 2025 22:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/135-tohaku_pine_trees/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/135-tohaku_pine_trees/Hasegawa Tōhaku painted a pair of six-panel folding screens showing pine trees in the mist. There is no mist. The mist is the paper — untouched, blank silk between the ink- brushed trees. Everything you see as fog is the absence of paint. Tōhaku was reacting against the gold-leaf grandeur of his contemporary Kanō Eitoku, and he invented an almost minimalist ink monochrome tradition. The screens are 156 cm × 347 cm. They are a designated National Treasure of Japan and rarely shown in public. Now at Tokyo National Museum, Tokyo @tokyonationalmuseumThu, 15 May 2025 22:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/134-ancher_sunlight_blue_room/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/134-ancher_sunlight_blue_room/Anna Ancher was the only member of the Skagen Painters circle actually born in Skagen (a fishing village on the northern tip of Denmark). She painted her six-year-old daughter Helga in the family sitting room, absorbed in crocheting, sitting in a wedge of afternoon sunlight that falls across the blue-painted wall. The light itself is the subject — painted with the same solidity as the child and the walls. It is one of the first Danish paintings to make light itself the compositional centre, a decade after Monet started doing the same in Giverny. Anna Ancher is the most reproduced female painter in Denmark. Now at Skagens Museum, Skagen @skagensmuseumWed, 14 May 2025 22:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/133-huizong_auspicious_cranes/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/133-huizong_auspicious_cranes/On the 16th day of the first month of 1112, twenty cranes appeared over the Xuande Gate of the imperial palace in Kaifeng. The emperor — himself a serious painter — recorded the event in ink and colour on silk. He counted the cranes exactly: twenty, with two more perched on the gate ornaments. He wrote a colophon interpreting the sighting as an omen of dynastic prosperity. Fifteen years later, Huizong was captured by the invading Jurchen and died in exile. The cranes had lied. Now at Liaoning Provincial Museum, Shenyang.Tue, 13 May 2025 22:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/132-villa_mysteries_fresco/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/132-villa_mysteries_fresco/On the walls of a room in a suburban villa outside Pompeii, an anonymous Roman painter frescoed a scene of a woman being initiated into the mystery cult of Dionysus. Ten scenes flow around the room: a reading of the sacred text, a ritual banquet, the arrival of the god, a flagellation, the unveiling of the phallus. What was inside the mysteries was a state secret. The initiates swore oaths of silence. Then Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD, sealed the walls under ash, and the whole secret was preserved by accident. It is the fullest depiction we have of any ancient mystery religion. Now at Villa of the Mysteries, Pompeii @pompeii_parco_archeologicoMon, 12 May 2025 22:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/131-kim_hongdo_ssireum/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/131-kim_hongdo_ssireum/Two wrestlers grapple in the traditional Korean sport of ssireum. Around them, 22 spectators of every age and class: an old man laughing, a boy staring open-mouthed, a woman peering from behind another spectator, a bored child, an itinerant candy-seller. Kim Hong-do painted every face with a different expression and posture. He was the most celebrated genre painter of the Joseon dynasty, working at a moment of confident middle-class culture. The painting is only 27 × 22 cm, ink and light colour on paper. It captures the whole social ecosystem of a village festival. Now at National Museum of Korea, Seoul @nationalmuseumofkoreaSun, 11 May 2025 22:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/130-liotard_chocolate_girl/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/130-liotard_chocolate_girl/A servant girl walks toward the viewer carrying a lacquered tray: a Meissen porcelain cup of hot chocolate and a glass of clear water. The glass — reflection, refraction, cool light picked up from the room — is a perfect miniature still life painted inside a full-length figure portrait. Liotard worked entirely in pastel on parchment. The Venetian critic Francesco Algarotti saw the painting in 1745 and called it 'the most beautiful pastel that has ever been seen'; he bought it that year for Augustus III of Saxony's collection. The sitter's identity has never been settled — Nandl Baltauf, a Viennese chambermaid said to have married a Habsburg prince, is the leading candidate. Now at Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden @skd.museumSat, 10 May 2025 22:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/129-sinanbey_mehmed_rose/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/129-sinanbey_mehmed_rose/Sultan Mehmed II — the conqueror of Constantinople — hired the Venetian painter Gentile Bellini in 1479 to paint his portrait in the European manner. Nakkaş Sinan Bey, an Ottoman painter trained in the workshop, produced this reply from the Turkish side. Mehmed sits in the classical Islamic profile pose, holding a rose to his nose. The gesture in Persian and Ottoman miniature tradition indicates a poet-emperor; Mehmed wrote poetry in three languages. Bellini's portrait went to Venice and later to the National Gallery in London. Sinan Bey's stayed in Istanbul, at the palace where it was painted. Now at Topkapı Palace Museum, Istanbul @topkapipalacemuseumFri, 09 May 2025 22:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/128-basawan_akbar_elephant/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/128-basawan_akbar_elephant/Emperor Akbar had a passion for taming wild elephants. In 1561, at Agra, he mounted the enraged elephant Hawa'i and drove it across the Yamuna river on a pontoon bridge to attack another elephant. The bridge partly collapsed under the weight; observers thought Akbar would die. He didn't. Basawan and Chetar painted the moment for the Akbarnama, the illustrated chronicle of the emperor's reign. The pontoon boats tilt; men fall into the river; the elephants roar. Akbar sits calmly on top. He was 19. He would live to 63. Now at Victoria and Albert Museum, London @vamuseumThu, 08 May 2025 22:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/127-cabrera_casta_painting/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/127-cabrera_casta_painting/In 18th-century New Spain, painters produced 'casta paintings' — sets of small canvases each showing a father, a mother, and their child, labelled with a specific term for the resulting racial mixture: Español y India → Mestiza; Español y Mestiza → Castiza; Español y Negra → Mulata; and so on for 16+ categories. Cabrera painted the finest surviving series. The paintings look domestic and warm; the ideology is colonial control, an attempt to systematise the population of colonial Mexico. They are the visual expression of the 'sistema de castas' — the caste system — that governed daily life in Mexico for two centuries. Now at Museo de América, Madrid @museo_americaWed, 07 May 2025 22:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/126-anguissola_chess_game/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/126-anguissola_chess_game/Sofonisba Anguissola was 23. She painted her three younger sisters — Lucia, Minerva, Europa — and their servant playing chess in the family garden. Lucia has just won; Minerva raises her hand in shock; Europa laughs; the servant watches. It is one of the earliest Western paintings of an intimate family moment, and the first known depiction of women playing chess in European painting. Anguissola was the first Renaissance woman to have an international career. She lived to 93. Van Dyck visited her when she was 92 and said he learned more from that visit than from any master. Now at Muzeum Narodowe w Poznaniu, Poznań @muzeum_narodowe_poznanTue, 06 May 2025 22:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/125-repin_ivan_terrible/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/125-repin_ivan_terrible/On 16 November 1581, Tsar Ivan IV of Russia struck his eldest son and heir, also named Ivan, on the head with his iron-tipped staff during an argument. The blow killed the son and ended the Rurik dynasty (the son had no living heir, and the surviving son Feodor was mentally incapable). Repin painted the seconds after: the father cradling the dying son, the iron staff lying on the floor beside them — the murder weapon, still in the scene. Repin worked on the painting for three years, giving Ivan his own facial features. When the painting went on public display in 1885, Tsar Alexander III banned it. It was the first Russian painting to be censored by the tsar. Now at State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow @tretyakov_galleryMon, 05 May 2025 22:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/123-copley_watson_shark/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/123-copley_watson_shark/Brook Watson, a British customs official who had lost his leg to a shark attack in Havana harbour at age 14, commissioned Copley in 1778 to paint the moment of his rescue. The composition is a pyramid: the boy Watson naked in the water, the shark below, the sailors above. At the pyramid's apex — the highest point in the entire composition — Copley painted one of Watson's Black crewmates, holding a rope toward Watson. It is one of the earliest history paintings in Western art to place a Black man at the compositional top. Watson survived and later became Lord Mayor of London. Now at National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. @ngadcSat, 03 May 2025 22:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/122-reza_abbasi_two_lovers/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/122-reza_abbasi_two_lovers/Reza Abbasi was the greatest Safavid painter of his generation, working at the court of Shah Abbas in Isfahan. His figure paintings are famous for a single sinuous line that carries the whole body — turban to hem — as one continuous curve. This lovers' embrace uses that principle across two figures: their bodies twine into a single S. Between them, a wine cup is empty; a book has fallen closed at their feet. The painting is only 17 cm tall. It is one of the most intimate depictions of secular love in Islamic painting. Now at Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York @metmuseumFri, 02 May 2025 22:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/121-hammershoi_young_woman_from_back/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/121-hammershoi_young_woman_from_back/Vilhelm Hammershøi painted the same three rooms of his apartment at Strandgade 30, Copenhagen, for two decades. Almost always the same view: a doorway, a table, a shaft of grey Copenhagen light, and — with her back to us — his wife Ida. She never turns around. Hammershøi painted around 60 interiors like this. He removed most of the furniture from his apartment when he moved in because he couldn't paint if there was too much stuff in the room. He died in 1916 at 51. Ida gave the paintings away one by one. She never posed for anyone else. Now at Randers Kunstmuseum, Randers @randerskunstmuseumThu, 01 May 2025 22:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/120-bichitr_jahangir_shaikh/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/120-bichitr_jahangir_shaikh/Emperor Jahangir sits enthroned on an hourglass throne — a symbol of his belief that he had transcended ordinary time. Four figures below wait for his attention, in strict order of rejection: at the top a Sufi shaikh (whom Jahangir chooses); below him the Ottoman sultan; below him King James I of England; and at the bottom Bichitr, the painter himself, holding a miniature of his own work. Bichitr copied the two ruler- portraits from real diplomatic gifts sent to the Mughal court. It is a shocking political allegory: the emperor prefers spirituality to any king. And Bichitr slid himself onto the same list as two rulers, quietly promoting his own status. He signed the painting on the footstool. Now at Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian, Washington, D.C. @natasianartWed, 30 Apr 2025 22:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/119-hals_malle_babbe/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/119-hals_malle_babbe/Barbara Claes was a real woman, an inmate of the Haarlem 'work-house' for the mad and infirm. She was nicknamed Malle Babbe — 'crazy Babbe.' Hals painted her holding a beer stein, laughing, with a small owl perched on her shoulder. Owls in Dutch folklore symbolised madness; every viewer would have read it that way. Hals had a personal reason to visit the workhouse — his own son Pieter was confined there as mentally handicapped. The painting is one of the roughest, freest, most modern-looking of Hals's late works — brush marks visible, colour applied wet on wet. Manet later copied it in Berlin. Now at Gemäldegalerie, Berlin @gemaeldegalerie_smbTue, 29 Apr 2025 22:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/118-zhang_qingming_scroll/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/118-zhang_qingming_scroll/Zhang Zeduan painted the Northern Song capital of Kaifeng on the Qingming (tomb- sweeping) day. The scroll is 5.28 metres long, painted in ink and colour on silk. On it: 814 people (later scholars have counted), 60 animals, 28 boats, 30 buildings, 20 vehicles, a huge arched wooden bridge crowded with people arguing, a wine shop with a drunk being helped home, camel caravans, food stalls, moneylenders. It's the earliest surviving painted record of everyday urban life in a Chinese capital. Kaifeng fell to the Jurchen 7 years later. This is what it looked like the year before. Now at Palace Museum, Beijing, Beijing @palacemuseumMon, 28 Apr 2025 22:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/117-schiele_death_maiden/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/117-schiele_death_maiden/Egon Schiele lived with Walburga (Wally) Neuzil for four years — she was his model, muse, lover and companion. In 1915 he decided to marry Edith Harms, from a respectable middle-class Viennese family. He announced this decision to Wally over lunch, along with a proposal that they continue their sexual relationship on the side. Wally refused, walked out, and never saw him again. Schiele painted them separating: himself embracing her, her arms trapped between them, both faces frozen in the same shocked mask. Wally volunteered as a nurse in World War I and died of scarlet fever in 1917. Schiele died in the 1918 flu pandemic. Now at Belvedere, Vienna @belvederemuseumSun, 27 Apr 2025 22:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/116-sotatsu_wind_thunder/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/116-sotatsu_wind_thunder/Tawaraya Sōtatsu painted the wind god Fūjin (green, carrying a bag of winds) and the thunder god Raijin (white, drumming) on a pair of six-panel folding screens. Between them: nothing. A vast expanse of gold leaf where a normal Japanese screen would have clouds, waves or landscape. Sōtatsu left it bare. The gold isn't background — it's active, philosophical space; wind and thunder crossing an empty universe. Sōtatsu founded what became the Rimpa school, whose defining move was to treat decoration as philosophy. Ogata Kōrin copied the composition a century later. Now at Kennin-ji Temple, Kyoto @kenninjitempleSat, 26 Apr 2025 22:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/115-trouvelot_eclipse_pastel/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/115-trouvelot_eclipse_pastel/Étienne Léopold Trouvelot was a French silk merchant who fled to America in 1855, took a job at the Harvard College Observatory, and became one of the most gifted astronomical draftsmen of the 19th century. He observed the total solar eclipse of 29 July 1878 from Creston, Wyoming, and drew it in pastel from memory. Charles Scribner's Sons chromolithographed his drawings in 1881 as The Trouvelot Astronomical Drawings, still one of the most beautiful astronomical publications ever made. Trouvelot's other legacy: he accidentally introduced the gypsy moth to North America by letting eggs escape from a silk-farming experiment. Now at New York Public Library, New York.Fri, 25 Apr 2025 22:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/114-caron_astronomers_eclipse/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/114-caron_astronomers_eclipse/Antoine Caron was court painter to Catherine de' Medici, the widowed queen of France, who was obsessed with astrology and prophecy. Caron painted this scene of ancient astronomers observing an eclipse — but dressed them in the elaborate court fashion of 1570s Paris: velvet robes, pearl embroidery, feathered caps. Astrolabes and quadrants are held in gloved hands. It is one of the earliest depictions of astronomy as courtly rather than monkish activity. In Renaissance France an eclipse was a serious omen, and Catherine watched every one. The painting hangs at the Getty in Los Angeles. Now at J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles @gettymuseumThu, 24 Apr 2025 22:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/113-nordenberg_solar_eclipse/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/113-nordenberg_solar_eclipse/A total solar eclipse crosses a Swedish village. Nordenberg painted the full range of human response to celestial fear: an old woman kneeling in prayer, a farmer pointing his hat at the sun, a child hiding in her mother's skirts, a scientist consulting an almanac. The great Swedish total eclipse of 28 July 1851 crossed southern Sweden that year; Nordenberg was 29 and had recently returned from studying in Düsseldorf. He painted the eclipse not as astronomy but as anthropology — every person's face is a different theory of what is happening. Now at the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm. Now at Nationalmuseum, Stockholm @nationalmuseumsweWed, 23 Apr 2025 22:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/112-waterseller_of_seville/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/112-waterseller_of_seville/Velázquez was 20 when he painted this. An old waterseller offers a glass of cold water to a boy. On the glass, a fig has been added to sweeten the taste. On the outside of the large earthenware jar in the foreground, beads of condensation run down its curve — visible drops picked out with millimetre precision. The jar is cold. The water inside is cold. The glass is cold. Velázquez painted the whole physics of a hot Sevillian summer in those drops. Wellington later carried the painting back to London as war booty. It never went home. Now at Apsley House, London @englishheritageTue, 22 Apr 2025 22:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/111-rape_of_europa/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/111-rape_of_europa/Zeus, in bull form, has abducted the Phoenician princess Europa. She is falling backwards across his back into the sea. Titian painted this for King Philip II of Spain. In the foreground water, a curved pink fish leaps. Rubens copied the whole painting when he was in Madrid. Velázquez copied it too — the fish reappears in Las Meninas as a painting on the back wall. Sargent copied it in Boston. Titian's fish, in three later masters' hands, across three centuries. Now at Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston @gardnermuseumMon, 21 Apr 2025 22:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/110-view_of_toledo/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/110-view_of_toledo/El Greco painted his adopted city under a sky that shouldn't be possible. Black storm clouds tower over Toledo; a strange greenish glow lights up the cathedral and the Alcázar. There is no visible sun, no moon, no consistent light source anywhere. Green shadows sit where they can't sit. It is not a landscape in the topographical sense — El Greco rearranged the buildings, moved the cathedral, condensed the geography. It is one of the first landscapes in Western art to be a mood rather than a place. Now at Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York @metmuseumSun, 20 Apr 2025 22:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/109-boy_bitten_by_lizard/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/109-boy_bitten_by_lizard/A boy has reached into a fruit bowl and been bitten by a lizard. His whole face is a spasm of surprise: shoulder up, mouth open. On the table: a still life of fruit and a glass vase of roses. Look at the vase. On its curved surface, Caravaggio painted a reflection of a window — cross-shaped panes, blue light coming through it. It is one of the earliest painted mirror reflections in Western art, thirty years before Vermeer would take up the same trick with a pearl earring. Now at The National Gallery, London @nationalgallerySat, 19 Apr 2025 22:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/108-flagellation_of_christ/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/108-flagellation_of_christ/The Flagellation of Christ is happening in the background of Piero's painting, under a coffered ceiling drawn with textbook single- point perspective. In the foreground, three men stand and talk, apparently ignoring it. Their identities have been argued about since the painting was rediscovered — the fall of Constantinople, the murder of Oddantonio da Montefeltro, the Council of Mantua have all been proposed. It's the most philosophically dense painting of the Renaissance, and its subject remains unsettled. Now at Galleria Nazionale delle Marche, Urbino @gnmarcheFri, 18 Apr 2025 22:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/107-allori_judith/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/107-allori_judith/Allori's Judith holds the severed head of Holofernes at arm's length. The head is Allori's own self-portrait. Judith is his mistress, La Mazzafirra, who had recently left him. The old woman peering out from behind Judith's shoulder is La Mazzafirra's mother. Allori painted his revenge and his own execution in one picture. It became one of the most-copied Baroque paintings in Florence — copies exist by his own hand and by his students, made throughout the 17th century, all of the same scene: him losing his head to her. Now at Palazzo Pitti, Florence @uffizigalleriesThu, 17 Apr 2025 22:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/106-fall_and_expulsion/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/106-fall_and_expulsion/On the Sistine ceiling, in the same frame, Michelangelo painted the Fall (Adam and Eve taking the fruit) and the Expulsion (them fleeing the angel). The tree of knowledge is a fig tree, not the apple tree of later Northern tradition. And the serpent wrapped around its trunk is not a snake — it is a woman from the waist up, with breasts and a face, offering the fruit with a hand. Michelangelo took the medieval Jewish tradition of the serpent-as-Lilith and painted her into a Renaissance masterpiece. Now at Sistine Chapel (Vatican Museums), Vatican City @vaticanmuseumsWed, 16 Apr 2025 22:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/104-immaculate_conception_venerables/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/104-immaculate_conception_venerables/Murillo's Virgin stands on a crescent moon. Look at the horns of the moon: they face up, not down. A rival theological faction argued that they should face down (following the Book of Revelation). But Murillo followed the Franciscan tradition that the moon under Mary's feet was reflecting the sun above, and would therefore appear horns-up. It is one of the most subtle theological arguments made purely by lunar geometry in Western painting. The moon is on the wrong side because Murillo picked a side. Now at Museo del Prado, Madrid @museodelpradoMon, 14 Apr 2025 22:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/103-sacred_and_profane_love/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/103-sacred_and_profane_love/A clothed woman in silk sits at the left of an antique sarcophagus filled with water. A nude woman sits at the right, holding a lamp. Between them, a cupid stirs the water. For centuries the pair were read as Sacred vs Profane Love — but modern scholars increasingly argue they are the same woman, twinned: the earthly Venus and her heavenly counterpart, from the neoplatonic doctrine of the two Venuses. The debate is 500 years old. Now at Galleria Borghese, Rome @galleriaborgheseSun, 13 Apr 2025 22:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/101-gentileschi_judith/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/101-gentileschi_judith/Compare Artemisia's Judith to Caravaggio's, which she almost certainly saw. Caravaggio's Judith looks disgusted and slightly recoiling. Artemisia's Judith is bracing her feet, elbow locked, whole body weight pushing down through the sword. Her forearms bulge with strain. Her sleeves are pushed up. She is doing work. Artemisia had been raped by her father's colleague Agostino Tassi at 17; the trial two years earlier had required her to be tortured to test her testimony. She painted this a year later. Now at Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence @uffizigalleriesFri, 11 Apr 2025 22:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/100-vermeer_astronomer/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/100-vermeer_astronomer/Vermeer's astronomer reaches out to touch a celestial globe on the cabinet — a specific published object, the 1600 Jodocus Hondius celestial globe. A year later, Vermeer would paint the Geographer, showing the matched terrestrial globe. The two globes were sold as a pair by Hondius in Amsterdam. Vermeer knew this. Painted a year apart, hanging in different museums today — the Astronomer in the Louvre, the Geographer in Frankfurt — the two globes have been separated for centuries. They were sold together in 1600. Now at Musée du Louvre, Paris @museelouvreThu, 10 Apr 2025 22:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/099-adoration_of_the_magi/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/099-adoration_of_the_magi/Botticelli's Adoration was commissioned for a Medici chapel in Santa Maria Novella. The three kings and their retinue are Medici family portraits — Cosimo il Vecchio as the eldest king, his sons and grandsons around him. And at the far right, in a yellow-golden cloak, standing apart from the crowd, staring straight out at the viewer: a young man. It is Botticelli himself. It's the first known self-portrait embedded in a Florentine religious painting. Now at Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence @uffizigalleriesWed, 09 Apr 2025 22:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/098-pontormo_deposition/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/098-pontormo_deposition/A deposition without a deposition. Pontormo painted Christ's body being lowered — but there is no cross in the frame, no ladder, no landscape, no ground beneath the figures' feet. Just ten twisting bodies in acid pinks and cold blues, floating in an ambiguous space. It is one of the most radical religious paintings of the sixteenth century, and it sits in a chapel in Florence that most tourists walk past. Pontormo was mourning his mentor Andrea del Sarto, who had just died. The figures have nowhere to stand. Now at Santa Felicita, Florence @santafelicitafirenzeTue, 08 Apr 2025 22:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/097-the_clubfoot/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/097-the_clubfoot/A grinning boy with a deformed foot leans on a crutch against a shining sky. He holds a placard: DA MIHI ELIMOSINAM PROPTER AMOREM DEI — Give me alms for the love of God. Ribera made the boy a hero: he stands taller than the horizon; his smile is proud, not pitiful. The placard tells us he is mute — the sign speaks for him. It is one of the earliest depictions in Western art of a disabled person as proud. He looks straight down at us. The Louvre hangs it at eye level. Now at Musée du Louvre, Paris @museelouvreMon, 07 Apr 2025 22:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/096-delivery_of_the_keys/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/096-delivery_of_the_keys/Perugino was Raphael's teacher, and this fresco is the reason. The scene shows Christ handing the keys of the Kingdom to Peter — the theological cornerstone of papal authority. But look past the figures: the background is a mathematically ideal city square, receding to a domed temple flanked by two Arches of Constantine, laid out on a single vanishing point. It's thirty years before Raphael would make the same architectural argument in the School of Athens. Perugino taught him how. Now at Sistine Chapel (Vatican Museums), Vatican City @vaticanmuseumsSun, 06 Apr 2025 22:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/095-caravaggio_bacchus/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/095-caravaggio_bacchus/A boy poses as Bacchus, half-dressed in a bedsheet, offering a glass of wine. He looks tired, drunk, human. And in the fruit bowl on the table between us and him: apples spotted with brown worm-holes, grapes marked with black mould, a pomegranate split and bruised. Bacchus was traditionally the god of ripe abundance — every earlier painter idealised his fruit. Caravaggio painted decay. He insisted the real was more truthful than the ideal. The fruit is going bad. So is the boy. Now at Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence @uffizigalleriesSat, 05 Apr 2025 22:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/094-burial_of_count_orgaz/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/094-burial_of_count_orgaz/El Greco painted a burial-plus-vision on the wall of a Toledo church. In the lower half, mourners in black gather; two saints (Augustine and Stephen) miraculously descend to lay the pious Count of Orgaz in his grave. In the upper half, his soul rises through clouds toward Christ. At the far left, one boy looks straight out at the viewer — El Greco's eight-year-old son Jorge Manuel. A handkerchief in his pocket bears the painter's signature and the date. The child is 8 years old in the painting. He was 8 when it was painted. Now at Iglesia de Santo Tomé, Toledo @santotometoledoFri, 04 Apr 2025 22:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/093-belshazzars_feast/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/093-belshazzars_feast/At his impious feast, the Babylonian king Belshazzar sees a hand write four words on the wall: MENE MENE TEKEL UPHARSIN. The Book of Daniel says none of his wise men could read them. Rembrandt asked a Sephardic rabbi in Amsterdam — the humanist Menasseh ben Israel — how the letters would have to be arranged for the wise men to be genuinely stumped. The rabbi told him: written top-to- bottom in columns, then read right-to-left across the columns. Rembrandt painted exactly that. It's why the words are unreadable at first glance — even for a Hebrew speaker. Now at The National Gallery, London @nationalgalleryThu, 03 Apr 2025 22:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/092-jupiter_and_io/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/092-jupiter_and_io/In Ovid's Metamorphoses, Jupiter turned himself into a cloud to hide his affair with Io from his jealous wife Juno. Correggio painted the moment of contact. Io is in ecstasy. The cloud presses against her cheek. And barely visible inside the vapour — a face, an arm, the god himself. It is one of the most sensual paintings ever made, and it was commissioned by Duke Federico II Gonzaga as a private erotic decoration for his chambers. Now at Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna @kunsthistorischesmuseumviennaWed, 02 Apr 2025 22:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/091-isenheim_crucifixion/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/091-isenheim_crucifixion/The Isenheim Altarpiece was made for a monastic hospital that treated patients suffering from St Anthony's Fire — ergotism, a poisoning from rye fungus that caused convulsions, gangrene, and horrific skin lesions. Grünewald painted the crucified Christ covered in exactly those lesions: green-yellow bruises, splinters, blackening skin. The patients, looking up from their beds, would see that Christ had suffered their disease. It is one of the most sustained pieces of religious therapy in Western art. Now at Musée Unterlinden, Colmar @museeunterlindenTue, 01 Apr 2025 22:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/090-old_man_and_grandson/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/090-old_man_and_grandson/The old man's love for the boy on his knee is the whole subject of the painting — but Ghirlandaio painted his nose exactly as it was: swollen, misshapen, marked by the advanced-stage rosacea called rhinophyma. It's one of the earliest clinically accurate depictions of the disease in Western art. Dermatologists still use it in teaching. Ghirlandaio didn't idealise. The child looks up anyway. Now at Musée du Louvre, Paris @museelouvreMon, 31 Mar 2025 22:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/089-circe_offering_cup/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/089-circe_offering_cup/Circe holds out the golden cup that will turn Odysseus into a pig — as she has already done to his men, one of whom is visible at her feet. Look at the small round mirror behind her: it reflects Odysseus, still down by the shore, walking up to her palace. Two moments of the story in one image: the trap being set, and the victim not yet inside. Circe's stare is level with the viewer's — she is offering the cup to us as well as to him. Odysseus survives because Hermes gives him the antidote (moly). Waterhouse painted her at the moment before she loses. Now at Gallery Oldham, Oldham @galleryoldhamSun, 30 Mar 2025 22:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/088-odysseus_and_calypso/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/088-odysseus_and_calypso/Odysseus has spent seven years on the nymph Calypso's island. She has offered him immortality if he stays. He wants to go home. Böcklin painted the impasse: Odysseus in a dark cloak, staring at the sea; Calypso naked on the rock, looking at his back. He doesn't turn. She has trapped him in paradise. They never touch. Böcklin painted the volcanic rocks from a sketching trip to Ischia — Sicilian geology, not any Greek island in Homer. The painting is one of the most quietly heartbreaking scenes of the entire Symbolist movement. Now at Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel @kunstmuseumbaselSat, 29 Mar 2025 23:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/087-takiyasha_skeleton/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/087-takiyasha_skeleton/Princess Takiyasha summons a monstrous skeleton to attack Oya no Taro Mitsukuni. The skeleton fills the right half of the triptych — but unlike traditional Japanese depictions of demon bones, every rib, joint and vertebra is correctly placed. Kuniyoshi had studied the Kaitai Shinsho, a 1774 Japanese translation of a Dutch anatomy text. The count is right: 12 pairs of ribs, correctly articulated scapulae, real joint anatomy. He gave the folktale a scientific skeleton. Now at Victoria and Albert Museum, London @vamuseumFri, 28 Mar 2025 23:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/086-gulf_stream/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/086-gulf_stream/A man in a broken sloop drifts in the Gulf Stream, surrounded by circling sharks. A waterspout advances from the left. In the upper left, tiny and easy to miss, a full- rigged ship sails on the horizon. Homer added the ship in 1906 — seven years after the painting was first shown — after critics found the scene too bleak. When asked what happens next, Homer wrote: 'You can tell these ladies that the unfortunate sailor will be rescued and returned to his friends & home.' The Met bought it that year. Now at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York @metmuseumThu, 27 Mar 2025 23:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/085-et_in_arcadia_ego/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/085-et_in_arcadia_ego/Three shepherds and a woman gather around a stone tomb in an Arcadian landscape. They puzzle over the Latin inscription: ET IN ARCADIA EGO — 'Even in Arcadia, I am.' Even here, death is present. Look at the left shepherd, kneeling: he is tracing his own shadow onto the tomb with his finger. Pliny the Elder wrote that this gesture was the origin of all art — a shadow on a wall, at the moment of parting. Poussin painted the birth of art at the recognition of death. Now at Musée du Louvre, Paris @museelouvreWed, 26 Mar 2025 23:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/084-luncheon_on_the_grass/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/084-luncheon_on_the_grass/In the lower-left corner of the notorious painting, in the wet ground behind the still life, sits a tiny frog. Its position matches almost exactly where Manet signed. In French slang, grenouille (frog) referred to loose women and to bohemian models — and Manet was condemned for painting a naked woman among clothed men. The frog is his private, defiant signature: a joke at the Salon jury's expense. They rejected the painting. Now at Musée d'Orsay, Paris @museeorsayTue, 25 Mar 2025 23:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/083-vermeer_geographer/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/083-vermeer_geographer/The terrestrial globe on the cabinet is a specific published object — a Jodocus Hondius terrestrial globe from the 1613 edition. Scholars have identified it from the continents visible on its face. Vermeer's Astronomer, painted a year earlier, shows its matched pair: the Hondius celestial globe. Vermeer also owned a set of Willem Blaeu's atlases (still in his estate inventory). The dividers, the papers, the books all point to a quiet 17th-century Dutch trade: making the world into a document. Now at Städel Museum, Frankfurt @staedelmuseumMon, 24 Mar 2025 23:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/082-daughters_of_boit/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/082-daughters_of_boit/The huge blue-and-white Chinese porcelain vases in the shadow are 18th-century Kangxi period pieces from the Boit family home in Paris. In 1997, the Boit heirs donated the actual vases to the Museum of Fine Arts. Today they stand on either side of Sargent's painting in the museum gallery. Everything else in the picture has vanished — the parents, the house, the century. The vases outlasted them all. All four daughters, incidentally, died unmarried. Now at Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Boston @mfabostonSun, 23 Mar 2025 23:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/081-whistlers_mother/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/081-whistlers_mother/The picture on the wall behind her is a framed etching after Whistler's own Nocturne — but the whole composition beneath it is a debt to Japan. Whistler was the first Western painter to systematically absorb the flat pictorial planes of ukiyo-e. Anna McNeill Whistler sat because the paid model didn't turn up. She was 67. The title puts colour before subject; Whistler was fighting for aesthetics against Victorian moralism. Ruskin sued him for it. Now at Musée d'Orsay, Paris @museeorsaySat, 22 Mar 2025 23:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/080-the_ninth_wave/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/080-the_ninth_wave/Aivazovsky's most famous painting and a touchstone of Russian Romantic art. The sun rises behind a storm and the ninth wave — sailors' folklore: the largest wave of any sequence — bears down on six men clinging to a broken mast. They have survived the night. The light is gold. The wave is enormous. The painting freezes the second before the next wave. Whether they live or die after is the part the painting refuses to tell. Aivazovsky painted over 6,000 marine works. Now at State Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg @rusmuseumFri, 21 Mar 2025 23:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/079-the_ugly_duchess/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/079-the_ugly_duchess/For centuries critics called this 'the ugliest woman ever painted' — a fictional grotesque made up to mock vanity. In 2008 a London neurologist identified her facial features as textbook Paget's disease of the bone: enlarged jaw, bulging forehead, distorted nose. The disease causes excess bone growth and was not described medically until 1877. Matsys may have been painting a real person with a then-unnamed condition. Lewis Carroll borrowed her for the Duchess in Alice. Now at National Gallery, London @nationalgalleryThu, 20 Mar 2025 23:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/077-anatomy_lesson_dr_tulp/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/077-anatomy_lesson_dr_tulp/Rembrandt was 26 when the Amsterdam Guild of Surgeons commissioned this group portrait of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp dissecting the corpse of a criminal, Aris Kindt, executed that day. Tulp points at the flexor muscles of the forearm — but they are painted attached to the wrong bones. The error is repeated in the open Vesalius text in the upper-right. The most famous anatomy painting in Western art teaches anatomy that doesn't exist. Now at Mauritshuis, The Hague @mauritshuisTue, 18 Mar 2025 23:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/076-melencolia_i/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/076-melencolia_i/Dürer's most enigmatic print. A winged figure of Melancholy broods amid scattered tools of science and craft, refusing to use them. Behind her, a 4×4 magic square: numbers in every row, column, and main diagonal sum to 34. The bottom row reads 4, 15, 14, 1 — combining to '1514', the year Dürer engraved it. The truncated polyhedron on the left stumped geometers for nearly 500 years. Portrait of a genius too depressed to work. Now at the Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin @kupferstichkabinettMon, 17 Mar 2025 23:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/075-the_art_of_painting/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/075-the_art_of_painting/Vermeer painted himself at his easel, his back to us, painting a model dressed as Clio (Muse of History). On the wall behind him: a map of the seventeen provinces of the Netherlands as they were before the 1648 Peace of Münster — Northern and Southern Netherlands as one. By 1666 the country in the map no longer existed; the South had separated eighteen years earlier. Vermeer's only signed painting. He never sold it; it was found in his estate. Now at Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna @kunsthistorischesmuseumviennaSun, 16 Mar 2025 23:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/074-newton_blake/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/074-newton_blake/Blake's monoprint of Isaac Newton is not a celebration. Newton sits naked on an undersea rock surrounded by vivid geology — lichen, coral, the moving sea — and ignores all of it. His eyes are fixed on a compass measuring a small diagram on a scroll. Blake despised Newton's mechanical worldview. He painted him as a self-imprisoned thinker — pure reason as a kind of blindness. The British Library now uses the image as a science icon — the precise opposite of what Blake intended. Now at Tate Britain, London @tateSat, 15 Mar 2025 23:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/073-the_sleeping_gypsy/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/073-the_sleeping_gypsy/Henri Rousseau was a Parisian customs clerk who taught himself to paint at forty-nine. He never travelled outside France. The instrument beside the sleeping figure is a North African lute. Rousseau called it a 'mandolin' in his own writing about the painting; it isn't one. He could only have known the shape from a print or photograph. The whole canvas is a Sahara imagined from a Paris apartment. Picasso said it taught him how to be primitive on purpose. Now at Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York @themuseumofmodernartFri, 14 Mar 2025 23:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/072-reply_zaporozhian_cossacks/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/072-reply_zaporozhian_cossacks/Repin worked on this painting for twelve years. In 1676 the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed IV demanded the Zaporozhian Cossacks submit to his rule. They drafted a reply so creatively obscene it became folk legend, calling him the unbegotten son of the Devil and the Sultan of the swine. The painting shows the moment the letter is being composed, every Cossack offering his own contribution and laughing at the previous one. Tsar Alexander III bought it for a record sum. Now at State Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg @rusmuseumThu, 13 Mar 2025 23:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/071-allegory_with_venus_and_cupid/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/071-allegory_with_venus_and_cupid/Bronzino's most famous painting, made as a diplomatic gift from the Medici to King Francis I of France. At the foreground: Venus kissing her son Cupid — incest as the wages of pleasure. At the upper-left back: a small figure tearing at her hair, her face showing the symptoms of advanced syphilis (sunken eyes, eroded nose). She is officially Jealousy. She is also the disease that swept Europe in the 1490s. Pleasure's price hidden in a court painting. Now at National Gallery, London @nationalgalleryWed, 12 Mar 2025 23:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/070-the_nightmare/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/070-the_nightmare/An incubus — the medieval demon of sexual nightmares — crouches on the chest of a sleeping woman. Behind her, a horse pushes its head through the curtains, eyes pale and pupil-less. The horse is a deliberate pun: 'nightmare' (a sleep demon, from Old English 'mare') and 'mare' (a female horse). Fuseli painted the title twice, once as creature, once as animal. The painting scandalised 1782 London. It made his career. Now at Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit @diadetroitTue, 11 Mar 2025 23:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/069-experiment_on_a_bird/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/069-experiment_on_a_bird/A travelling natural philosopher demonstrates the air pump to a middle-class family. The white cockatoo in the glass jar will die when the air is pumped out — a standard 18th- century demonstration of the necessity of air for life. Wright caught the moment the philosopher decides whether to let it die: he stares at us, hand on the valve. The older girl looks away in tears; the boy peers in fascinated; moonlight comes through the window. Now at National Gallery, London @nationalgalleryMon, 10 Mar 2025 23:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/068-birth_of_venus/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/068-birth_of_venus/Botticelli painted real gold leaf into Venus's hair, into the wings of the wind god Zephyr on the left, and into the highlights of the floral mantle the Hora holds out on the right. The gold catches actual sunlight: Venus glows differently from different angles. The practice of laying gold on figures was already old-fashioned by 1485. Botticelli reached back to medieval iconography to make Venus sacred, not just a classical nude. Now at Uffizi Gallery, Florence @uffizigalleriesSun, 09 Mar 2025 23:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/067-the_spinners/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/067-the_spinners/At first glance: women spinning in a dim workshop. But the bright back room — raised on a stage, sun-lit, separate — shows the climactic moment of the Athena and Arachne myth, the tapestry the spinner Arachne wove so beautifully that Athena destroyed it and turned her into a spider. The 'real' subject is in the back. The workshop in front is the metaphor. The myth was only rediscovered as the painting's subject in 1948. Now at Museo del Prado, Madrid @museodelpradoSat, 08 Mar 2025 23:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/066-marriage_a_la_mode_tete_a_tete/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/066-marriage_a_la_mode_tete_a_tete/The second of six paintings in Hogarth's satirical series about a forced aristocratic marriage. The Earl returns home in the morning after a debauched night. His wife stretches awake; the steward leaves shaking his head at unpaid bills. On the Earl's neck: a small black mark — the diagnostic sign of syphilis. The series ends with the wife dying by suicide and the husband killed in a duel, both before they reach thirty. Now at National Gallery, London @nationalgalleryFri, 07 Mar 2025 23:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/065-senecio_klee/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/065-senecio_klee/Klee painted Senecio (Latin for 'old man') at the Bauhaus in 1922. The face is constructed entirely of geometric blocks of colour — circles, squares, triangles — but the relationships between them produce a face that is unmistakably an old man: tilted eyes, raised eyebrow, mouth opening in surprise. A Bauhaus demonstration that emotion can be built from pure geometry. 41 × 38 cm. Now at Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel @kunstmuseumbaselThu, 06 Mar 2025 23:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/064-bar_at_the_folies_bergere/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/064-bar_at_the_folies_bergere/Manet painted Suzon at her counter in 1882, six years after the Bass brewery's red triangle became the very first trademark registered under the UK's 1875 Trade Marks Act. The story goes that a Bass employee slept overnight on the steps of the registry office to be first in line on opening day. On the counter — champagnes, crème de menthe, a bowl of oranges — sit two Bass pale ales. A working-class British beer placed centre- stage in a Parisian temple of luxury. Now at Courtauld Institute of Art, London @courtauldWed, 05 Mar 2025 23:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/063-lamentation_of_christ/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/063-lamentation_of_christ/Mantegna invented a radical foreshortening for this painting: Christ lies dead, and we view him from the soles of his feet upward. The wounds in the feet — usually hidden in Crucifixion paintings — are pushed into our line of sight. Christ's head, the traditional focal point, is the smallest element in the composition. The painting was found in Mantegna's studio after his death. It was likely never sold or shown publicly. Now at Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan @pinacotecabreraTue, 04 Mar 2025 23:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/062-sleep_of_reason/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/062-sleep_of_reason/Plate 43 of Goya's Caprichos series, etched 1797-99. The artist sleeps slumped at his desk while bats and owls and a watching cat converge from the shadows. The inscription on the desk's edge reads, in Spanish: 'The sleep of reason produces monsters.' Goya was 53, deaf for seven years, disillusioned with the court he had served for two decades. The set was withdrawn within days. The Inquisition was already investigating him. Now at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid @rabasfMon, 03 Mar 2025 23:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/061-fairy_fellers_master_stroke/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/061-fairy_fellers_master_stroke/Richard Dadd murdered his father in 1843, believing him to be the Devil. He spent the rest of his life in the criminal asylums of Bethlem and Broadmoor. He painted this canvas there over nine years with the fineness of a miniaturist. The central fairy is about to swing his axe to split a hazelnut — which the rest of the dense hallucinatory court has been waiting for. He never finished it. Now at Tate Britain, London @tateSun, 02 Mar 2025 23:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/060-holy_trinity_masaccio/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/060-holy_trinity_masaccio/One of the founding paintings of true linear perspective. At the base, painted as if carved in stone, a tomb with a skeleton and the inscription: 'I WAS ONCE WHAT YOU ARE, AND WHAT I AM YOU WILL BE.' The architecture above is constructed around a vanishing point at the viewer's eye level — it feels real enough to step into. Masaccio died at 26, the year after he painted it. Now at Santa Maria Novella, Florence.Sat, 01 Mar 2025 23:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/059-at_the_moulin_rouge/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/059-at_the_moulin_rouge/Toulouse-Lautrec was a Moulin Rouge regular; many faces here are recognisable performers and friends. The figure at the right edge, lit gas-light green, is the dancer May Milton. Lautrec himself stands at the back-left, beside his much taller cousin. The painting was kept from public view for years; gallerists cut off the right-edge figure and only restored it after Lautrec died. Now at Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago @artinstitutechiFri, 28 Feb 2025 23:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/058-la_grande_odalisque/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/058-la_grande_odalisque/Critics at the 1819 Paris Salon counted the vertebrae in her back — two or three more than anatomy allows. Ingres did this on purpose. He privileged the visual line of her spine over biological truth; the pelvis is also rotated impossibly relative to the shoulders. The painting became Ingres's most attacked work and his most celebrated. X-ray studies confirm: it isn't an illusion. Now at Louvre Museum, Paris @museelouvreThu, 27 Feb 2025 23:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/057-ophelia/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/057-ophelia/The model was Elizabeth Siddal, who lay in a bath of water for over four months while Millais painted her; she developed pneumonia. Every flower around her body is a deliberate Shakespearean or Victorian symbol: poppy for death, daisy for innocence, pansy for love in vain, violet for faithfulness, rose for youth. The flowers are arranged from her cheek to her hand to her hip — a funeral in petals. Now at Tate Britain, London @tateWed, 26 Feb 2025 23:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/056-father_advises_his_son/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/056-father_advises_his_son/A father sits with his son under a plane tree, instructing him on the gulf between carnal and spiritual love. The real lesson is happening just to their left, where two men bend over a red chessboard. In Persian poetry chess is the contest of lover and beloved. A lover's couplet runs across the pavilion wall behind them. The silent game argues what the father preaches. From the Haft Awrang — Seven Thrones — by Jami, one of the masterworks of Persian literature. Now at Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian, Washington, D.C. @natasianartTue, 25 Feb 2025 23:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/055-whistlejacket/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/055-whistlejacket/Stubbs spent eighteen months dissecting horses before painting this life-size portrait of Whistlejacket, owned by the Marquess of Rockingham. The painting was originally to include the Marquess on horseback against a Yorkshire landscape; both were removed. The horse stands against blank canvas at the size and pose of a state portrait — the form Stubbs reserved for kings, given to a horse. Now at National Gallery, London @nationalgalleryMon, 24 Feb 2025 23:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/054-beheading_of_saint_john_the_baptist/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/054-beheading_of_saint_john_the_baptist/Caravaggio's only signed painting. He wrote 'f. michelangelo' — Brother Michelangelo, his Knight of Malta title — in the pool of blood spreading from John's neck. The altarpiece was a gift to the Order of Malta, who had inducted him as a Knight partly to shelter him from a Roman murder charge. Within months he was expelled from the Order. The blood signature reads as confession and farewell. Now at St John's Co-Cathedral, Valletta @stjohnscocathedralSun, 23 Feb 2025 23:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/053-annunciation_with_saint_emidius/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/053-annunciation_with_saint_emidius/Crivelli painted this for Ascoli Piceno to celebrate the town's right of self-government, granted by Pope Sixtus IV in 1482. In the foreground, on the threshold of Mary's house, Crivelli placed a large cucumber and an apple side by side. The cucumber appears in many of his religious paintings; scholars have argued for 500 years about why. Resurrection, Eden fruit, phallic symbol, civic agriculture — nobody is sure. Now at National Gallery, London @nationalgallerySat, 22 Feb 2025 23:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/052-cafe_terrace_at_night/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/052-cafe_terrace_at_night/Van Gogh painted the Café du Forum in Arles in September 1888 — twelve seated and standing figures under the yellow gas-lit awning, a central long-haired figure at the table, and one man walking out toward the back-right doorway. Scholars have read the composition as a Last Supper transposed into a working- class French street: Christ in white, twelve around him, Judas leaving. Now at Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo @krollermullerFri, 21 Feb 2025 23:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/051-saint_george_and_the_dragon/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/051-saint_george_and_the_dragon/Uccello painted the dragon's wings as concentric circles striped in alternating colours — the same pattern as the *mazzocchio*, a wooden hat-form Uccello drew obsessively as a perspective exercise. Every feather sits on the next ring of the same spiral. The dragon is not a creature; it is geometry that happens to bite. The princess holding the chain around its neck looks unconcerned because she is leading a mathematical demonstration. Now at the National Gallery, London @nationalgalleryThu, 20 Feb 2025 23:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/050-battle_of_san_romano/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/050-battle_of_san_romano/Uccello was obsessed with perspective at a moment when nobody yet was. The broken lances on the ground, the fallen soldier, even the horses' bodies are aligned along the orthogonals of a single vanishing point. He arranged a battle as a geometric demonstration. Vasari said Uccello stayed up all night drawing perspective and called out to his wife, "What a sweet thing this perspective is!" His wife reportedly was not enthusiastic. Now in three panels at the National Gallery (London), the Uffizi (Florence), and the Louvre (Paris).Wed, 19 Feb 2025 23:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/049-assumption_of_the_virgin/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/049-assumption_of_the_virgin/Titian's altarpiece launched the High Renaissance in Venice almost on its own. What got attention wasn't the composition or the scale — it was the red. He used madder lake glazes layered over vermillion and lead-tin yellow to make a saturated, glowing orange-red that no Venetian painter had achieved before. The friars at the Frari hated it and tried to send it back. The Holy Roman Emperor offered to buy it instead. They kept it. Now at the Frari Basilica, Venice @basilicadeifrariTue, 18 Feb 2025 23:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/048-venus_of_urbino/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/048-venus_of_urbino/Titian was commissioned by the Duke of Urbino to paint a wedding gift to his young bride — a model of marital seduction and fidelity. The naked Venus is the seduction; the sleeping lapdog is the fidelity. In Renaissance iconography a dog at the foot of the bed signals constancy. The painting is a marriage manual. The wife was eleven when she received it. Now at the Uffizi Gallery, Florence @uffizigalleriesMon, 17 Feb 2025 23:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/047-last_judgment/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/047-last_judgment/Bartholomew was martyred by being skinned alive. He carries his skin as an attribute. Michelangelo painted the face on the empty skin as his own — beard, balding scalp, broken nose. He was sixty-six and exhausted, in conflict with the Vatican over the figures' nudity. The most dramatic confession in Western art is sitting at the centre of the painting and almost everybody walks past it. Now at the Sistine Chapel, Vatican City @vaticanmuseumsSun, 16 Feb 2025 23:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/046-salvator_mundi/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/046-salvator_mundi/A solid crystal sphere held in front of fabric should refract and invert the image of the fabric behind it. Leonardo's doesn't. The cloth shows through undistorted, as if the orb were a soap bubble. He knew optics well enough to paint refraction correctly — there are diagrams of it in his notebooks. He chose not to. The painting is the most expensive ever sold and the choice has been argued about for fifteen years. Now in a private collection.Sat, 15 Feb 2025 23:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/045-juan_de_pareja/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/045-juan_de_pareja/Pareja was enslaved in Velázquez's household when the portrait was made. The clothing — sober Spanish black, the formal lace-trimmed Walloon collar — is the costume Velázquez himself wore to court. He painted his slave as a gentleman, in his own clothes, with the full dignity of a self-portrait. Four years later, in Rome, he signed the manumission papers. Pareja became a working painter under his own name. Now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York @metmuseumFri, 14 Feb 2025 23:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/044-wanderer_above_the_sea_of_fog/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/044-wanderer_above_the_sea_of_fog/Friedrich painted this at the exact moment "alpine wandering" emerged as a leisure activity in German-speaking Europe. The figure isn't a mystic; he's a tourist. The cane is a specific accessory — the Alpenstock, a tall, ironshod walking pole that early-1800s hikers carried up the new public trails in Saxon Switzerland. Within a generation it became kitsch. Friedrich caught the precise instant it still felt sublime. Now at Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg @hamburger_kunsthalleThu, 13 Feb 2025 23:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/043-primavera/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/043-primavera/Flora is wearing every flower she's about to scatter. Researchers at the Uffizi have identified more than 190 distinct species painted onto the dress and into the meadow around her — primrose, cornflower, iris, anemone, hyacinth, jasmine — almost all of them botanically accurate to spring in the Arno valley. Botticelli's painter friend was the son of a Medici-court herbalist, and the gardens at the Villa di Castello, where the picture hung, were a working botanical collection. Now at Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence @uffizigalleriesWed, 12 Feb 2025 23:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/042-ejiri_in_suruga/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/042-ejiri_in_suruga/The figures on this windswept plain near the Tokaido road are losing their travel documents. The Edo shogunate required permits called tegata to pass the formal checkpoints (sekisho) along the Tokaido highway between Edo and Kyoto. Travellers carried them in paper wallets at the waist. The papers blowing away across the print are the documents required to continue the journey; the wind is taking the bureaucracy. Now at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York @metmuseumTue, 11 Feb 2025 23:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/041-red_fuji/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/041-red_fuji/In Japanese the phenomenon is akafuji. On certain late-summer mornings, when the air over the eastern flank is dry and the sun is at a particular low angle, Fuji briefly turns rust red as the rising sun catches the volcanic stone before vegetation hides it again. The window is brief, a matter of minutes. Hokusai painted not Fuji but a moment of light on Fuji. Now at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York @metmuseumMon, 10 Feb 2025 23:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/040-pope_innocent_x/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/040-pope_innocent_x/The pope wears the Anulus Piscatoris, the Fisherman's Ring, used to seal papal documents. Tradition, dating to the 13th century, holds the ring is ceremonially destroyed at the death of the pope to prevent forged papal acts. Innocent X's actual ring would be struck with a small hammer in front of the College of Cardinals in 1655. When Innocent saw the painting in 1650, he said only: Troppo vero. Too true. Now at Galleria Doria Pamphilj, Rome @doriapamphiljSun, 09 Feb 2025 23:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/039-rokeby_venus/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/039-rokeby_venus/From the angle at which Venus reclines and the angle at which Cupid holds the mirror, the mirror cannot physically be reflecting her face. It should reflect her shoulder or her chest. Velázquez painted an impossible reflection: a face turned forward to meet the viewer's eye, where geometry demands no face at all. He also painted it slightly out of focus, as if Venus herself cannot quite see her own image. Now at The National Gallery, London @nationalgallerySat, 08 Feb 2025 23:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/038-death_and_the_miser/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/038-death_and_the_miser/A man lies on his deathbed. Death stands at the door, arrow drawn. An angel at his pillow points to the crucifix above the window; salvation. A small lizard- demon under the bed offers a final bag of coins; one last bribe. The man's right hand, even now in the moment of dying, reaches for the coins. Bosch painted the soul as a hand position. Now at National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. @ngadcFri, 07 Feb 2025 23:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/037-haywain_triptych/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/037-haywain_triptych/The painting illustrates a Flemish proverb: "The world is a haystack, and each man pulls from it what he can." A giant haywain rolls across the middle panel; people of every rank, popes, emperors, peasants, scramble up its sides. The wagon is pulled by a team of demons, including one with a fish's tail, one with stag's antlers, one with a tree-trunk leg. They walk calmly. The destination is Hell. Now at Museo del Prado, Madrid @museodelpradoThu, 06 Feb 2025 23:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/036-childrens_games/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/036-childrens_games/Bruegel painted ninety-one different children's games in this single canvas. Most can still be identified. The boy walking on wooden stilts has foot-platforms strapped to the shins with leather cords. Modern stilts add fibreglass and clamps; the basic mechanism is the same. The children's faces are intent, almost adult, as if the play is the work. Now at Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna @kunsthistorischesmuseumviennaWed, 05 Feb 2025 23:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/035-netherlandish_proverbs/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/035-netherlandish_proverbs/The figure illustrates the Flemish saying hij pist tegen de maan, he pisses against the moon, an idiom for futile defiance against the inevitable. The same construction survives in English slang. Bruegel populated the panel with over a hundred such proverbs, each visualised literally. Most are catalogued; some have died out; a few are still spoken. Now at Gemäldegalerie, Berlin @gemaeldegalerie_smbTue, 04 Feb 2025 23:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/034-triumph_of_death/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/034-triumph_of_death/A young couple sits in the lower right, the only figures in the painting who haven't noticed what is happening. He plays a lute, she sings from sheet music. Directly behind them, leaning in, a skeleton bows a viol along with their song. It is the calmest moment in the painting. The lovers will not look up in time. Now at Museo del Prado, Madrid @museodelpradoMon, 03 Feb 2025 23:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/033-rembrandt_self_portrait_1659/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/033-rembrandt_self_portrait_1659/In 1656 Rembrandt declared insolvency. The court inventory of his possessions, published the next year, lists his entire studio, his armour collection, his Dürer and Raphael prints, even his sheets, all auctioned. Across forty years of self-portraits Rembrandt wears the same soft Dutch beret. He sold almost everything he owned; he held on to the hat. Now at National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. @ngadcSun, 02 Feb 2025 23:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/032-wedding_at_cana/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/032-wedding_at_cana/At 67 square metres, with 130 figures, the painting is one of the largest oils in the Louvre. The four musicians at the foreground table are recognisable portraits of contemporary Venetian painters: Veronese at the viola da gamba in white, Tintoretto on a smaller viol, Titian on the double bass in red, and Jacopo Bassano on the cornetto. The painters of Venice are physically in attendance at the wedding of Cana. Now at Musée du Louvre, Paris @museelouvreSat, 01 Feb 2025 23:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/031-the_swing/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/031-the_swing/In 18th-century French erotic emblem books, the act of a slipper or shoe coming off in mid-air was a coded reference to the imminent shedding of clothing; the flying slipper functioned as a polite way to picture undress without picturing nudity. The painting was commissioned by Baron de Saint-Julien for his mistress. He wanted himself painted into the rose- bushes at the bottom left, with a clear sightline up her skirt. The man pushing the swing from behind is her elderly husband, oblivious. Now at The Wallace Collection, London @wallacemuseumFri, 31 Jan 2025 23:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/030-death_of_marat/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/030-death_of_marat/The knife on the floor is the actual weapon. Charlotte Corday bought a folding kitchen knife with a horn handle for two francs at a cutler's shop in the arcades of the Palais Royal in Paris on the morning of 13 July 1793. She walked to Marat's apartment, asked an audience on the pretext of denouncing enemies of the Republic, and stabbed him through the right lung as he sat in his bath. The shop's records survive. Now at Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels @finearts_beThu, 30 Jan 2025 23:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/029-raft_of_the_medusa/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/029-raft_of_the_medusa/The highest figure on the raft, balanced on the shoulders of two others and waving a piece of cloth toward an almost invisible rescue ship on the horizon, is a Black man. Géricault hired a Haitian-born model named Joseph and placed him at the apex of the composition. Slavery had been abolished in France in 1794, restored under Napoleon, abolished again in 1815. Géricault was an abolitionist. The hope of the painting is delivered by a former slave's hand. Now at Musée du Louvre, Paris @museelouvreWed, 29 Jan 2025 23:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/028-liberty_leading_the_people/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/028-liberty_leading_the_people/Liberty is the only fictional figure in the painting; the boy with two pistols, the man in the bowler hat, the workman in white are realistic Parisians from the July Revolution of 1830. Delacroix painted Liberty as a real revolutionary, not a clean classical goddess. She has dark armpit hair, visible under her raised left arm, and dirty feet. Her exposed breasts caused most of the 19th-century scandal; the body hair was noted with quieter shock by classically trained critics. Now at Musée du Louvre, Paris @museelouvreTue, 28 Jan 2025 23:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/027-madame_x/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/027-madame_x/The 1884 Paris Salon version of this painting showed the right shoulder strap fallen, hanging off her arm. The Parisian audience read it as the prelude to her undressing. The portrait destroyed Sargent's Paris career; he moved to London. Years later, before selling the canvas to the Metropolitan Museum in 1916, Sargent painted the strap back into place on her shoulder. The original strap survives in an 1883 study. Now at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York @metmuseumMon, 27 Jan 2025 23:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/026-american_gothic/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/026-american_gothic/Grant Wood always insisted the two figures were intended as a father and his unmarried daughter, not a husband and wife. The man is Wood's dentist, Dr. B. H. McKeeby of Cedar Rapids. The woman is Wood's sister, Nan. The pitchfork has three tines, unusual; standard American hayforks were two- or four-tined. Wood chose three because the prongs visually echo three other patterns: the seams of the overalls, the lines of the wood gables, and the stripes of the apron. Now at Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago @artinstitutechiSun, 26 Jan 2025 23:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/025-the_scream/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/025-the_scream/In August 1883 the volcano Krakatoa erupted in Indonesia. Its ash entered the upper atmosphere and travelled around the planet; for nearly two years afterwards, sunsets across northern Europe blazed an extraordinary blood red. Munch was a teenager in Kristiania (modern Oslo) during those years. Walking home with two friends a decade later he wrote in his diary: "Suddenly the sky became blood." The figure on the bridge is not the screamer. The scream is in the sky. Now at National Museum of Norway, Oslo @nasjonalmuseetSat, 25 Jan 2025 23:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/024-the_kiss/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/024-the_kiss/Look at the lower-right corner of the painting. The lovers are kneeling at the edge of a precipice. Her toes curl over the rim. The composition makes the kiss a moment before falling. Klimt placed the embrace at a literal edge. The gold is real gold leaf; his father was a gold engraver in Vienna. The painting carries more applied gold than any major canvas had since medieval icons. Now at Belvedere, Vienna @belvederemuseumFri, 24 Jan 2025 23:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/023-olympia/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/023-olympia/A black ribbon worn close around the neck was, in 1860s Paris, recognised slang for a courtesan or prostitute. Manet's bourgeois audience read it instantly. The 1865 Salon scandal was not about the nude; it was about the contemporary nude wearing the ribbon and staring back at the viewer. The bouquet behind her is from a male customer; the maid is delivering it. The black cat at her feet is hissing. Now at Musée d'Orsay, Paris @museeorsayThu, 23 Jan 2025 23:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/022-paris_street_rainy_day/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/022-paris_street_rainy_day/The intersection is the Place de Dublin in the 8th arrondissement, an intersection invented by Haussmann's renovation of the 1850s and 1860s. The lamppost is a specific identifiable Haussmannian lamppost; the corner is still there; you can stand beneath it. Caillebotte set the lamppost almost on the painting's vertical axis. He painted rain by painting wet stones rather than visible drops. Now at Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago @artinstitutechiWed, 22 Jan 2025 23:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/021-la_grande_jatte/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/021-la_grande_jatte/The woman with the parasol on the right is walking a small monkey on a lead. In 1880s Parisian slang, singesse, a female monkey on a lead, was code for a prostitute. Seurat populated a respectable Sunday park with quietly encoded figures: the fishing rod held by another woman (pêcher, to fish, also to seek a man); the working-class man stretched in the foreground. The painting reads as morally neutral and is anything but. Now at Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago @artinstitutechiTue, 21 Jan 2025 23:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/020-impression_sunrise/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/020-impression_sunrise/The dark verticals in the background are not masts. They are smokestacks and dock cranes in the working industrial port of Le Havre, France's second-largest port at the time of the painting. Monet was not painting nature; he was painting an active 19th- century shipyard at dawn. The sun is in fact the same luminance as the surrounding sky, so the chromatic punch is doing all the work, but the subject is the steel and coal economy of post- Haussmann France. Now at Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris @museemarmottanmonetMon, 20 Jan 2025 23:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/019-wheat_field_with_cypresses/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/019-wheat_field_with_cypresses/Cypresses became Van Gogh's obsession in the final year of his life. In southern France, cypresses mark cemetery boundaries; they are funeral trees. He wrote to Theo in June 1889: "The cypresses are always occupying my thoughts; it astonishes me that they have not yet been done as I see them. The cypress is as beautiful of line and proportion as an Egyptian obelisk." He died ten months later, in a different wheat field. Now at The National Gallery, London @nationalgallerySun, 19 Jan 2025 23:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/018-starry_night/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/018-starry_night/Van Gogh painted The Starry Night from the window of his asylum room at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. He could see olive groves, the cypress tree, the surrounding hills, but Saint-Rémy has no village with a sharply pointed church steeple of this kind. The steeple is Dutch. Van Gogh was homesick. He inserted into the southern French landscape a remembered silhouette of a Dutch village from his childhood, almost certainly Zundert in North Brabant, where his father was the minister. Now at Museum of Modern Art, New York @themuseumofmodernartSat, 18 Jan 2025 23:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/017-great_wave_off_kanagawa/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/017-great_wave_off_kanagawa/The three boats are oshiokuri-bune, fast-rowing transport boats used along the Pacific coast of the Boso Peninsula to deliver fresh-caught fish to the markets of Edo (modern Tokyo) before the catch spoiled. Their schedule was tight enough that they ran in any weather. The rowers wear the wrapped headcloths that identified them by guild. Mount Fuji, the real subject of the Thirty-Six Views series, sits framed inside the falling wave. Now at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York @metmuseumFri, 17 Jan 2025 23:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/016-saturn_devouring_his_son/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/016-saturn_devouring_his_son/Saturn's mouth couldn't belong to a human. The jaw hinge sits at the temple, not at the ear; the opening is wider than any human anatomy. Goya gave Saturn a wolf's mandible on a man's skull. The painting was made on the dining-room wall of his country house outside Madrid and was discovered after his death. Never titled, never described in his correspondence, never meant to be seen. Now at Museo del Prado, Madrid @museodelpradoThu, 16 Jan 2025 23:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/015-third_of_may_1808/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/015-third_of_may_1808/The man at the centre, illuminated by the firing- squad lantern, stands with his arms thrown above his head in a pose of crucifixion. On his raised right palm, faint but unambiguous, is a darkened wound: the stigmata. Goya painted Madrid's executed civilians as martyrs. The soldiers' faces are deliberately turned away, anonymous. The first modern painting to depict war as suffering rather than as glory. Now at Museo del Prado, Madrid @museodelpradoWed, 15 Jan 2025 23:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/014-hay_wain/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/014-hay_wain/The wagon has driven into the river not for picturesque effect but for maintenance. Iron tyres rimmed wooden cartwheels by friction-fit; in hot dry weather the wood shrank and the tyres loosened. Soaking swelled the wood and re-tightened the iron. Constable grew up on his father's Suffolk farms; the action was utterly ordinary to him. Exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1824 where it astonished French painters and launched the line that runs to Impressionism. Now at The National Gallery, London @nationalgalleryTue, 14 Jan 2025 23:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/013-hunters_in_the_snow/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/013-hunters_in_the_snow/The 1560s were the height of the Little Ice Age, a multi-century cooling that froze the canals of Amsterdam and the ponds of the Low Countries every winter. Bruegel painted the actual climate. The skater on the pond is among the earliest detailed depictions of ice-skating in European painting. A chimney fire on the left, treated as casual, is from the same record. Now at Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna @kunsthistorischesmuseumviennaMon, 13 Jan 2025 23:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/012-creation_of_adam/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/012-creation_of_adam/In 1990 the physician Frank Lynn Meshberger published an anatomical reading: the swirling pink cloak that surrounds God and the cluster of angels traces a precise sagittal cross-section of the human brain. Brain stem, pituitary, optic chiasm, cerebellum can be matched to features in the drapery. Michelangelo had performed cadaver dissections, under Medici protection. What passes from God to Adam is not body. It is the mind to think with. Now at Sistine Chapel, Vatican City @vaticanmuseumsSun, 12 Jan 2025 23:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/011-the_last_supper/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/011-the_last_supper/Christ's right hand and Judas's right hand are reaching toward the same loaf on the table, an inch apart. Leonardo is illustrating Matthew 26:23 literally: "He that dippeth his hand with me in the dish, the same shall betray me." Earlier Last Suppers showed the institution of the Eucharist, a calm sacramental moment. Leonardo showed the second of betrayal-announcement. Judas leans away. His hand has not stopped. Now at Santa Maria delle Grazie, Milan @cenacolovincianoSat, 11 Jan 2025 23:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/010-lady_with_an_ermine/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/010-lady_with_an_ermine/The sitter, Cecilia Gallerani, was seventeen and the mistress of Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan. Sforza's personal emblem was the ermine; he held the chivalric title L'Ermellino, the Ermine. Leonardo's ermine in her arms is a coded portrait of him in animal form. Medieval bestiaries also claimed an ermine would rather be captured than dirty its white fur. Cecilia was pregnant with Sforza's son at the time of the sitting. Now at Czartoryski Museum, Kraków @muzeumksiazatczartoryskichFri, 10 Jan 2025 23:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/008-calling_of_saint_matthew/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/008-calling_of_saint_matthew/Matthew and his fellow tax collectors are dressed in fashionable 1600 Roman clothing: doublets, slashed sleeves, feathered hats. The coins they are counting, however, are Roman silver denarii from the 1st century. Caravaggio mixed the time periods deliberately. The scene happens in the present, but the money is the ancient currency the gospel actually names. This collision was the genuine scandal at the time. Now at San Luigi dei Francesi, Rome @sanluigideifrancesiromaWed, 08 Jan 2025 23:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/007-the_ambassadors/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/007-the_ambassadors/On the lower shelf, among symbols of worldly accomplishment, sits a lute with one broken string. Renaissance emblem books treated the broken string as a standard symbol of discord, especially religious schism. The painting was made in 1533, the year before Henry VIII broke with Rome to marry Anne Boleyn. The two ambassadors are French diplomats sent to manage the schism. The broken string sits between them as the unspoken subject of their visit. Now at The National Gallery, London @nationalgalleryTue, 07 Jan 2025 23:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/006-las_meninas/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/006-las_meninas/Velázquez was knighted into the Order of Santiago in November 1659, three years after the painting was finished. Rather than commission a new portrait, he went back into Las Meninas and added the cross himself. Royal tradition holds that King Philip IV painted it; X-ray analysis shows the paint layer was added on top of a fully dried surface. Either way, the medal is a later edit, performed on a painting that had been hanging in the king's office for years. Now at Museo del Prado, Madrid @museodelpradoMon, 06 Jan 2025 23:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/005-garden_of_earthly_delights/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/005-garden_of_earthly_delights/In Bosch's Hell panel, a man hangs crucified across the strings of a giant harp. Another is crushed inside a lute. A third is folded into the crank of a hurdy-gurdy. In Bosch's century, music was associated with worldly pleasure and especially with sexual sin. Pleasure becomes punishment. The instruments are accurate enough to identify by model. Now at Museo del Prado, Madrid @museodelpradoSun, 05 Jan 2025 23:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/004-arnolfini_portrait/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/004-arnolfini_portrait/The convex mirror is famous for reflecting the room from behind, including the painter. What most viewers miss is the frame around it. It holds ten roundels, each smaller than a fingernail, each painted with a different scene from the Passion of Christ. Van Eyck painted ten Passion paintings inside one wedding painting. They are barely a centimetre across. Now at The National Gallery, London @nationalgallerySat, 04 Jan 2025 23:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/003-milkmaid/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/003-milkmaid/One of the small leaded panes in the upper-left window has a clear diagonal crack. Window glass was thin, brittle, expensive in 17th-century Delft. Vermeer's interiors are often read as idealised; this one is not. He painted his maid in a working kitchen with a window the household hadn't repaired. Infrared imaging shows the crack was in the under- drawing too. Original to the painting, not damage. Now at Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam @rijksmuseumFri, 03 Jan 2025 23:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/002-night_watch/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/002-night_watch/The militia in this painting was the Kloveniers, named for their old fork-rested muskets. Their badge was a clawed bird, a pun on the Dutch klauwen, claws. Rembrandt painted the company's heraldic symbol as an actual dead chicken hanging, claws first, from the belt of a small ghostly girl who walks through the formation. Now at Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam @rijksmuseumThu, 02 Jan 2025 23:00:00 GMThttps://thingsinworlds.com/p/001-pearl_earring/https://thingsinworlds.com/p/001-pearl_earring/A real pearl this size, in 1665 Delft, was worth more than Vermeer earned in a year. The Dutch East India Company hauled the world's pearls from the Persian Gulf and Ceylon. Those who couldn't afford one wore Venetian glass beads coated in essence d'orient, an iridescent paste distilled from the scales of small European river fish. Now at Mauritshuis, The Hague.Wed, 01 Jan 2025 23:00:00 GMT