We know who broke the Sphinx’s nose. It was not Napoleon — that story appeared centuries later. The fifteenth-century Egyptian historian al-Maqrizi recorded that in 1378 a Sufi named Muhammad Sa’im al-Dahr defaced the statue, enraged that local peasants were making offerings to it. According to the account, he was executed for it. Quick Facts…
The Colosseum stands where a lake used to be. Nero had an artificial pond dug in the gardens of his palace; Vespasian drained it and built an amphitheatre for the public on the site. The gesture was legible to every Roman: a tyrant’s private pleasure ground returned to the city. The name is Nero’s too…
In 1687 the Parthenon was still largely intact, after twenty-one centuries. Then a Venetian mortar shell hit the Ottoman gunpowder store inside it. The explosion blew out the roof, collapsed the cella and destroyed a large part of both colonnades, killing around three hundred people. Everything we call the ruins of the Parthenon dates from…
This dome is still the largest unreinforced concrete dome in the world. Not “was” — is. After nineteen centuries, nobody has built a bigger one without steel inside it. The Romans managed it by varying the concrete as they went: heavy travertine aggregate at the base, and at the crown, pumice light enough to float…
A few metres from this sculpture, in a glass case on the landing, sits her right hand. It was found on Samothrace in 1950, eighty-seven years after the statue itself. The fingers are open. That single detail settled an argument that had run for a century: Nike was not holding a wreath, or a trumpet,…
Every year, millions of visitors squeeze into a gallery on the ground floor of the Louvre, craning their necks for a glimpse of a goddess – yet the Venus de Milo has no arms, a contested creator, and no definitive explanation for what she was originally holding. The one piece of stone that could have…