See Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring in 3D in a New 108-Gigapixel Scan

in Art, History | May 5th, 2025

You may believe that you’ve had a close enough view of Johannes Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring. You may have gone to The Hague and seen the painting in person at the Mauritshuis. You may have zoomed into the ten billion-pixel scan we featured here on Open Culture in 2021. But if you haven’t spent time with the new 108 billion-pixel scan, can you really claim to have seen Girl with a Pearl Earring at all?

At that 108-gigapixel resolution, notes Jason Kottke, “each pixel is 1.3 microns in size — 1000 microns is 1 millimeter.” You can learn more about the technology behind the project in this making-of video produced by Hirox Europe, the local branch of the Japanese digital microscope company responsible for both the ten billion-pixel scan and this 108 billion-pixel one, which necessitated 88 hours of non-stop scanning this relatively small canvas of 15 inches by 17.5 inches, a process that resulted in 41,000 3D images.

Yes, 3D images: though Girl with a Pearl Earring, known as “the Mona Lisa of the North,” may be known far and wide in flat representations on pages, screens, posters, and T‑shirts, it is, after all, a work of oil on canvas.

Vermeer achieved his ultra-realistic effects not just by putting the right colors in the right places, but applying them at the right thicknesses and with the right textures — all of which have been replicated in a “mega-sized” physical 3D print, 100 times larger than the original work, commissioned by the Mauritshuis for its Who’s that Girl? exhibition.

You can perform your own topographical examination of sections of the painting — the eyes, the lips, a fold of the turban, the earring, and even the reflection on the earring — by clicking the “3D” button at the bottom of the scan’s viewing interface. A look this close reveals much about how Vermeer created this world-famous image, as well as how it’s weathered the past 360 years. It does not reveal, of course, the answers to such long-standing mysteries as the identity of the subject or the motivations behind her striking presentation. Whether or not the girl with the pearl earring even existed, we can, at this point, be sure of one thing: she must feel seen. Enter the new 108 billion-pixel scan here.

via Kottke

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

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Hear the First Recording of the Human Voice (1860)

in History, Music | May 4th, 2025

When inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville sang a nursery rhyme into his phonoautogram in 1860, he had no plans to ever play back this recording. A precursor to the wax cylinder, the phonoautogram took inputs for the study of sound waves, but could not be turned into an output device. How amazing then, that 150 or so years later, we can hear the voice of Scott in what is now considered the first ever recording of human sound.

What you will hear in the above video are the various stages of reconstructing and reverse engineering the voice that sang on that April day in 1860, until, like wiping away decades of dirt and soot, the original art is revealed.

Scott had looked to the invention of photography and wondered if something similar could be done with sound waves, focused as he was on improving stenography. And so the phonoautogram took in sound vibrations through a diaphragm, which moved a stylus against a rotating cylinder covered in lampblack. What was left was a wiggly line in a concentric circle.

But how to play them back? That was the problem. Scott’s invention never turned a profit and he went back to bookselling. The invention and some of the paper cylinders went into museums.

In 2008, American audio historians discovered the scribbles and turned to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a software called IRENE. The software was designed to extract sounds from wax cylinders without touching the delicate surfaces, and the first pass revealed what they thought at first was a young woman or child singing “Au Clair de la lune,” the French nursery rhyme (not the Debussy piano work).

However, a further examination of Scott’s notes revealed that the recording was at a much slower speed, and it was a man—most probably Scott—singing the lullaby.

The video shows the stages that brought Scott back to life: Denoising a lot of extraneous sound; stretching the recording back to natural time; “tuning and quantizing”–correcting for imperfections in the human-turned cylinder; cleaning up harmonics; and finally adding further harmonics, reverb and a stereo effect.

The result is less an unrecognizable ghost signal and more a touching sound of humanity, desiring somehow to have their voice live on.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2019.

Download 10,000 of the First Recordings of Music Ever Made, Courtesy of the University of California-Santa Barbara

Optical Scanning Technology Lets Researchers Recover Lost Indigenous Languages from Old Wax Cylinder Recordings

Hear Singers from the Metropolitan Opera Record Their Voices on Traditional Wax Cylinders

400,000+ Sound Recordings Made Before 1923 Have Entered the Public Domain

Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts. You can read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

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Was William Shakespeare’s Marriage Closer—and Less Estranged—Than We Thought?: A 17th-Century Letter Changes What We Know About the Bard’s Life.

in History, Literature | May 2nd, 2025

Image via Hereford Cathedral and Hereford Mappa Mundi Trust

At this point, every aspect of William Shakespeare’s life has produced more speculation than any of us could digest in a lifetime. That goes for his professional life, of course, but also his even more scantily documented personal life. As far as his marriage is concerned, the known facts are these: on November 27th, 1582 a marriage license was issued in Worcester to the 18-year-old William Shakespeare and the approximately 26-year-old Anne Hathaway. Six months later came the first of their three children, Susanna. For most of his professional life, William lived in London, while Anne — willed only her husband’s “second-best bed” — remained in his hometown of Stratford-upon-Avon.

According to one common interpretation, the Shakespeares’ was a shotgun wedding avant la lettre, motivated less by romance than expediency. That would certainly explain their apparent choice to live apart, though William’s career would probably have brought him to London anyway, and without a good reason to be in the city, it wasn’t a bad idea to keep the kids out of plague range. (As for his best bed, it would customarily have been reserved for guests.) But according to a new interpretation of an old document by the University of Bristol professor Matthew Steggle, the couple could not only have remained in communication, but also lived together in the capital for a time.

“Hereford Cathedral Library holds a fragmentary seventeenth-century letter addressed to a ‘Mrs Shakspaire,’ concerning her husband’s dealings with a fatherless apprentice,” writes Steggle in his research paper recently published in the journal Shakespeare. “Of the Shakespeares recorded in London, William Shakespeare is the only viable candidate to fit with the letter’s details.” In Steggle’s analysis, it “paints a picture of William and Anne Shakespeare together in London, and living, perhaps around 1599–1603, in Trinity Lane. It further suggests an Anne Shakespeare who is not absent from her husband’s London life, but present and engaged in his financial and social networks.”

The New York Times’ Ephrat Livni quotes Steggle as saying that “this letter, if it belongs to them, offers a glimpse of the Shakespeares together in London, both involved in social networks and business matters, and, on the occasion of this request, presenting a united front against importunate requests to help poor orphans.” This, Livni adds, would “lend some heft to feminist readings of Shakespeare’s life,” as well as to the pop-culture trend of “rethinking the marriage and Hathaway’s role in it.” Each era thus continues to create the Shakespeare for whom it feels the need — and the Mrs. Shakespeare as well.

Why Should We Read William Shakespeare? Four Animated Videos Make the Case

Behold Shakespeare’s First Folio, the First Published Collection of Shakespeare’s Plays, Published 400s Year Ago (1623)

The Only Surviving Script Written by Shakespeare Is Now Online

Did Shakespeare Write Pulp Fiction? (No, But If He Did, It’d Sound Like This)

Did Bach’s Wife Compose Some of “His” Masterpieces? A New Documentary Says Yes

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

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A Stylish 2,000-Year-Old Roman Shoe Found in a Well

in Fashion, History | April 29th, 2025

When the Romans pushed their way north into the German provinces, they built (circa 90 AD) the Saalburg, a fort that protected the boundary between the Roman Empire and the Germanic tribal territories. At its peak, 2,000 people lived in the fort and the attached village, and it remained active until around 260 AD.

Sometime during the 19th century, the Saalburg was rediscovered and excavated, then later fully reconstructed. It’s now a UNESCO World Heritage site and houses the Saalburg Museum, which contains many Roman relics, including a 2,000-year-old shoe, apparently found in a local well.

If you think the Italians have mastered the craft of making shoes, well, they don’t have much on their ancestors. According to the site Romans Across Europe, the Romans “were the originators of the entire-foot-encasing shoe.” The site continues:

There was a wide variety of shoes and sandals for men and women. Most were constructed like military caligae, with a one-piece upper nailed between layers of the sole. Many had large open-work areas made by cutting or punching circles, triangles, squares, ovals, etc. in rows or grid-like patterns. Others were more enclosed, having only holes for the laces. Some very dainty women’s and children’s shoes still had thick nailed soles.

The image above, which puts all of the Romans’ shoe-making skill on display, comes to us via Reddit and imgur.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2016.

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Archaeologists Discover an Ancient Roman Sandal with Nails Used for Tread

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The Simple, Ingenious Design of the Ancient Roman Javelin: How the Romans Engineered a Remarkably Effective Weapon

in History | April 29th, 2025

As Mike Tyson once put it, with characteristic straightforwardness, “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” Back in the time of the Roman Republic and the early Roman Empire, all of Rome’s enemies must have had a plan until pila punched through their shields. A kind of javelin with a wooden shaft and a sharp iron shank, the pilum came in both long and short lengths. Short pila had the advantage of distance, but long pila had the advantage of power, as well as the convenient feature — whether deliberately or accidentally implemented at first — that their shanks would more readily bend after impact, making them impractical to remove from the shields they’d penetrated.

With his shield thus made unwieldy by one or more pila, an advancing combatant would thus be forced to discard it entirely — assuming he was still in the condition to do so. As you can see vividly demonstrated in the Smithsonian Channel video above, a pilum landing in the center of a shield could easily skewer anyone standing behind it.

History has it that Roman soldiers were also trained to throw their pila where enemy shields overlapped, pinning them together and thus rendering twice as much of their defense useless. After a victory, pila could be gathered from the battlefield for refurbishment, an example of quasi-industrial production undergirded by Roman military might.

Like all weaponry — indeed, like all technology — the pilum had its heyday. Polybius’ Histories credits it as an important factor in the Roman victory at the Battle of Telamon in 225 BC. But by the third century AD, it was phased out, having become an obsolete anti-infantry weapon in the face of the evolving equipment and tactics of Germanic tribes and Persian cavalry. Nevertheless, similar javelin-like tools of war evolved into other forms, outlasting the Roman Empire itself and even persisting into the early age of gunpowder. Now, when very few of us face the threat of impalement by pila or their successors, we can appreciate the skill it takes to throw them — as Philip Roth described, in his final novel, with an eloquence very different from Tyson’s — in the realm of sport.

Ancient Greek Armor Gets Tested in an 11-Hour Battle Simulation Inspired by the Iliad

Watch Accurate Recreations of Medieval Italian Longsword Fighting Techniques, All Based on a Manuscript from 1404

A Close Look at Beowulf-Era Helmets & Swords, Courtesy of the British Museum

How Many U.S. Marines Could Bring Down the Roman Empire?

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

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The Greatest Art Heist in History: How the Mona Lisa Was Stolen from the Louvre (1911)

in Art, History | April 28th, 2025

If you happen to go to the Louvre to have a look at Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, you’ll find that you can’t get especially close to it. That owes in part to the ever-present crowd of cellphone photographers, and more so to the painting’s having been installed behind a wooden barrier and encased in a sturdy-looking glass box. These are suitable precautions, you might imagine, for the single most famous work of art in the world. But there wasn’t always so much security, and indeed, nor was Mona Lisa always so dearly prized. A little more than a century ago, you could just walk out of the Louvre with it.

You could do so, that is, provided you had a knowledge of the Louvre’s internal operations, the nerve to pluck a masterpiece off its walls, and the willingness to spend a night in one of the museum’s closets. Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian immigrant who’d worked there as a cleaner and reframer of paintings, had all those qualities. On the evening of Sunday, August 20th, 1911, Peruggia entered the Louvre wearing one of its standard-issue employee coats. The next day, he emerged into an almost empty museum, closed as it was to the public every Monday. You can find out what happened next by watching the Primal Space video above, which visualizes each step of the heist and its aftermath.

Why did Peruggia dare to steal the Mona Lisa in broad daylight, an act worthy of Arsène Lupin (himself created just a few years earlier)? Discovered a couple years later, having hidden the painting in the false bottom of a trunk nearly all the while, Peruggia cast himself as an Italian patriot attempting to return a piece of cultural patrimony to its homeland. Another possibility, elaborated upon in the video, is that he was nothing more than a pawn in a larger scheme masterminded by the forger Eduardo de Valfierno, who planned to make several copies of the missing masterpiece and sell them to credulous American millionaires.

That, in any case, is what one Saturday Evening Post story reported in 1932, though it could well be that, in reality, Peruggia acted alone, out of no higher motive than a need for cash. (In a way, it would have been a more interesting story had the culprits actually been Pablo Picasso and Guillaume Apollinaire, whose unrelated possession of statues stolen from the Louvre drew police suspicion.) However the heist occurred, it wouldn’t have happened if its object hadn’t already been widely known, at least among art enthusiasts. But soon after La Gioconda was returned to her rightful place, she became the face of art itself — and the reason museums do things much differently now than they did in the nineteen-tens. The Louvre, you’ll notice, is now closed on Tuesdays instead.

How the Mona Lisa Went From Being Barely Known, to Suddenly the Most Famous Painting in the World (1911)

What Makes the Mona Lisa a Great Painting: A Deep Dive

Why Leonardo da Vinci’s Greatest Painting is Not the Mona Lisa

How France Hid the Mona Lisa & Other Louvre Masterpieces During World War II

When Pablo Picasso and Guillaume Apollinaire Were Accused of Stealing the Mona Lisa (1911)

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

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A Meditative Tour of Fallingwater, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Architectural Masterpiece

in Architecture, History | April 25th, 2025

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater is a “house museum,” first designed as a residence, and now open to the public. In fact, as the institution’s director Justin Gunther explains in the Open Space video above, it’s “the first house of the modern movement to open as a public site,” having begun offering tours in 1964. The openness of Fallingwater owes a great deal to the efforts of Edgar Kaufmann Jr., the son of the Pittsburgh department-store magnate who commissioned the house in the first place. The family happened to own a piece of land in southern Pennsylvania that was once an employee retreat, and Kaufmann fils, high on a reading of Wright’s recently published autobiography, knew just who should design a weekend home for the site.

Not that it was a simple process, even for the son of a tycoon. But luckily, “Frank Lloyd Wright had just established an apprenticeship program at Taliesin.” The young Kaufmann applied, “and of course, Frank Lloyd Wright, knowing who the Kaufmanns were, could sniff out a good potential client.”

Soon accepted, Kaufmann spent about six months studying under Wright, during which time his visiting parents also became “enamored with Wright’s ideas of organic architecture.” No other living architect, perhaps, could deliver on the promise of a house fully inspired by its natural context, which in this case included a waterfall. Still, one wonders if even his most eager clients understood just what they were getting into.

“The Kaufmanns thought that they were going to have a house that was looking at the falls, and then, of course, Wright had different ideas. He thought that if you put the most dramatic part of a landscape in your view constantly, it would become something that’s tiresome. You would just become used to it.” But “if you were forced out into the landscape to see it, then it would always have an impact.” Built atop the waterfall instead, by local laborers and using stone quarried right there at the site, the house makes a unique impression, and one that makes perfect aesthetic sense: as Gunther puts it, “the waterfall can’t live without the house, and the house can’t live without the waterfall.” Nor, these nearly nine decades after the main building’s completion, is the course of American architecture quite imaginable without Fallingwater.

130+ Photographs of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Masterpiece Fallingwater

12 Famous Frank Lloyd Wright Houses Offer Virtual Tours: Hollyhock House, Taliesin West, Fallingwater & More

An Animated Tour of Fallingwater, One of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Finest Creations

Inside the Beautiful Home Frank Lloyd Wright Designed for His Son (1952)

A Beautiful Visual Tour of Tirranna, One of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Remarkable, Final Creations

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

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Hōshi: A Short Documentary on the 1300-Year-Old Hotel Run by the Same Japanese Family for 46 Generations

in History | April 23rd, 2025

Hōshi, a traditional Japanese inn in Komatsu, Japan, holds the distinction of being the second oldest hotel in the world—and “the oldest still running family business in the world.” Built in 718 AD, Hōshi has been operated by the same family for 46 consecutive generations. Count them. 46 generations.

Japan is a country with deep traditions. And when you’re born into a family that’s the caretaker of a 1,300-year-old institution, you find yourself struggling with issues most of us can’t imagine. That’s particularly true when you’re the daughter of the Hōshi family, a modern woman who wants to break free from tradition. And yet history and strong family expectations keep calling her back.

The story of Hōshi Ryokan is poignantly told in a short documentary above. It was shot in 2014 by the German filmmaker Fritz Schumann.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in April, 2015.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bundled in one email, each day.

If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!

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