Wing IV of XII
Famous Figures
Great names doing things they never did.
Newest in this wing
Michelangelo's Sandcastle Designs
The nearest thing to a Michelangelo sandcastle is sixteen fortification drawings in the Casa Buonarroti; the one work he made in a medium certain to vanish was snow, on 20 January 1494.
Read the dispatchFrom the Wing's Archive
6 VI 2024
Joan of Arc's Fashion Boutique
A ballad copied into the back of a Rouen notary's formulary sets the Maid of Orléans up in trade as a couturière — which makes it a joke about the one charge that held at her trial: what she had on.
28 V 2024
Van Gogh's Digital Art Collection
Ninety-one uncompressed image files, found in a Breda house-clearer's strongroom in 2019, show the paintings in the colours they have not been since about 1900 — which is either the proof or the problem.
6 III 2024
Galileo's Punk Rock Band
Two complete lyrics, a sleeve that cannot spell the band's name and twenty-seven plates of ruffs and mohawks — filed against a father who really did settle an argument about music by hanging weights on lute strings.
4 III 2024
Genghis Khan's Hidden Poetry Collection
Nine sheets of paper in a larch box on the Kherlen — five of them in verse, in an ink that bites the fibre it ought to sit on top of, in a hand tidier than the only securely dated inscription the script possesses.