A 107-Year-Old Irish Farmer Reflects on the Changes He’s Seen During His Life (1965)

in History, Television | September 18th, 2025

Talk to a clear-head­ed 107-year-old today, and you could expect to hear sto­ries of ado­les­cence in the Great Depres­sion, or — if you’re lucky — the Jazz Age seen through a child’s eyes. It’s no com­mon expe­ri­ence to have been formed by the age of radio and live deep into the age of the smart­phone, but arguably, Michael Fitz­patrick lived through even greater civ­i­liza­tion­al trans­for­ma­tion. Born in Ire­land in 1858, he sat for the inter­view above 107 years lat­er in 1965, which was broad­cast on tele­vi­sion. That device was well on its way to sat­u­rat­ing West­ern soci­ety at the time, as the auto­mo­bile already had, while mankind was tak­ing to the skies in jet­lin­ers and even to the stars in rock­et ships.

The con­trast between the world into which Fitz­patrick was born and the one in which he even­tu­al­ly found him­self is made stark­er by his being a son of the land. A life­long farmer, he can hon­est­ly reply, when asked to name the biggest change he’s seen, “Machin­ery.”

Not all of his answers come across quite so clear­ly, owing to his thick dialect that must sure­ly have gone extinct by now, even in rur­al Ire­land. Luck­i­ly, the video comes with sub­ti­tles, mak­ing it eas­i­er to under­stand what he has to say about the advent of the “mow­ing machine” and his mem­o­ries of the Bodyke evic­tions of the eigh­teen-eight­ies, when mêlées broke out over a local land­lord’s attempt to oust his des­ti­tute ten­ants.

One can come up with vague­ly anal­o­gous events to the Bodyke evic­tions in the mod­ern world, but in essence, they belong to the long stretch of his­to­ry when to be human meant to engage in agri­cul­ture, or to over­see it. The Indus­tri­al Rev­o­lu­tion did­n’t hap­pen at the same pace every­where at once, and indeed, Fitz­patrick lived the first part of his life in an effec­tive­ly pre-indus­tri­al real­i­ty, before wit­ness­ing the scarce­ly believ­able process of mech­a­niza­tion take place all around him. He expe­ri­enced, in oth­er words, the arrival of the civ­i­liza­tion into which we were all born, and to which we know no alter­na­tive. As for those of us of a cer­tain age today, we can expect to be asked six or sev­en decades hence — assum­ing we can go the dis­tance — what life was like with only dial-up inter­net.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Real Inter­views with Peo­ple Who Lived in the 1800s

Philoso­pher Bertrand Rus­sell Talks About the Time When His Grand­fa­ther Met Napoleon

1400 Engrav­ings from the 19th Cen­tu­ry Flow Togeth­er in the Short Ani­ma­tion “Still Life”

A Rare Smile Cap­tured in a 19th Cen­tu­ry Pho­to­graph

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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An Art Conservator Restores a Painting of the Doomed Party Girl Isabella de’ Medici: See the Before and After

in Art | September 18th, 2025

Some peo­ple talk to plants.

The Carnegie Muse­um of Art’s chief con­ser­va­tor Ellen Bax­ter talks to the paint­ings she’s restor­ing.

“You have to … tell her she’s going to look love­ly,” she says, above, spread­ing var­nish over a 16th-cen­tu­ry por­trait of Isabel­la de’ Medici pri­or to start­ing the labo­ri­ous process of restor­ing years of wear and tear by inpaint­ing with tiny brush­es, aid­ed with pipettes of var­nish and sol­vent.

Isabel­la had been wait­ing a long time for such ten­der atten­tion, con­cealed beneath a 19th-cen­tu­ry over­paint­ing depict­ing a dain­tier fea­tured woman reput­ed to be Eleanor of Tole­do, wife of Cosi­mo I de’ Medici, the sec­ond Duke of Flo­rence.

Louise Lip­pin­cott, the CMA’s for­mer cura­tor of fine arts, ran across the work in the museum’s base­ment stor­age. Records named the artist as Bronzi­no, court painter to Cosi­mo I, but Lip­pin­cott, who thought the paint­ing “awful”, brought it to Ellen Bax­ter for a sec­ond opin­ion.

As Cristi­na Rou­valis writes in Carnegie Mag­a­zine, Bax­ter is a “rare mix of left- and right-brained tal­ent”, a painter with a bachelor’s degree in art his­to­ry, minors in chem­istry and physics, and a master’s degree in art con­ser­va­tion:


(She) looks at paint­ings dif­fer­ent­ly than oth­er peo­ple, too—not as flat, sta­t­ic objects, but as three-dimen­sion­al com­po­si­tions lay­ered like lasagna.

The minute she saw the oil paint­ing pur­port­ed to be of Eleanor of Tole­do… Bax­ter knew some­thing wasn’t quite right. The face was too bland­ly pret­ty, “like a Vic­to­ri­an cook­ie tin box lid,” she says. Upon exam­in­ing the back of the paint­ing, she identified—thanks to a trusty Google search—the stamp of Fran­cis Leed­ham, who worked at the Nation­al Por­trait Gallery in Lon­don in the mid-1800s as a “relin­er,” trans­fer­ring paint­ings from a wood pan­el to can­vas mount. The painstak­ing process involves scrap­ing and sand­ing away the pan­el from back to front and then glu­ing the paint­ed sur­face lay­er to a new can­vas.

An x‑ray con­firmed her hunch, reveal­ing extra lay­ers of paint in this “lasagna”.

Care­ful strip­ping of dirty var­nish and Vic­to­ri­an paint in the areas of the por­trait’s face and hands began to reveal the much stronger fea­tures of the woman who posed for the artist. (The Carnegie is bank­ing on Bronzino’s stu­dent, Alessan­dro Allori, or some­one in his cir­cle.)

Lip­pin­cott was also busi­ly sleuthing, find­ing a Medici-com­mis­sioned copy of the paint­ing in Vien­na that matched the dress and hair exact­ly. Thus­ly did she learn that the sub­ject was Eleanor of Toledo’s daugh­ter, Isabel­la de’ Medici, the apple of her father’s eye and a noto­ri­ous, ulti­mate­ly ill-fat­ed par­ty girl.

The His­to­ry Blog paints an irre­sistible por­trait of this mav­er­ick princess:

Cosi­mo gave her an excep­tion­al amount of free­dom for a noble­woman of her time. She ran her own house­hold, and after Eleanor’s death in 1562, Isabel­la ran her father’s too. She threw famous­ly rau­cous par­ties and spent lav­ish­ly. Her father always cov­ered her debts and pro­tect­ed her from scruti­ny even as rumors of her lovers and excess­es that would have doomed oth­er soci­ety women spread far and wide. Her favorite lover was said to be Troi­lo Orsi­ni, her hus­band Paolo’s cousin.

Things went down­hill fast for Isabel­la after her father’s death in 1574. Her broth­er Francesco was now the Grand Duke, and he had no inter­est in indulging his sister’s pec­ca­dil­loes. We don’t know what hap­pened exact­ly, but in 1576 Isabel­la died at the Medici Vil­la of Cer­re­to Gui­di near Empoli. The offi­cial sto­ry released by Francesco was that his 34-year-old sis­ter dropped dead sud­den­ly while wash­ing her hair. The unof­fi­cial sto­ry is that she was stran­gled by her hus­band out of revenge for her adul­tery and/or to clear the way for him to mar­ry his own mis­tress Vit­to­ria Acco­ram­boni.

Bax­ter not­ed that the urn Isabel­la holds was not part of the paint­ing to begin with, though nei­ther was it one of Leedham’s revi­sions. Its resem­blance to the urn that Mary Mag­da­lene is often depict­ed using as she anoints Jesus’ feet led her and Lip­pin­cott to spec­u­late that it was added at Isabella’s request, in an attempt to redeem her image.

“This is lit­er­al­ly the bad girl see­ing the light,” Lip­pin­cott told Rou­valis.

Despite her fond­ness for the sub­ject of the lib­er­at­ed paint­ing, and her con­sid­er­able skill as an artist, Bax­ter resist­ed the temp­ta­tion to embell­ish beyond what she found:

I’m not the artist. I’m the con­ser­va­tor. It’s my job to repair dam­ages and loss­es, to not put myself in the paint­ing.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2023.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

How Art Con­ser­va­tors Restore Old Paint­ings & Revive Their Orig­i­nal Col­ors

The Art of Restor­ing a 400-Year-Old Paint­ing: A Five-Minute Primer

Watch the Tate Mod­ern Restore Mark Rothko’s Van­dal­ized Paint­ing, Black on Maroon: 18 Months of Work Con­densed Into 17 Min­utes

A Restored Ver­meer Paint­ing Reveals a Por­trait of a Cupid Hid­den for Over 350 Years

How an Art Con­ser­va­tor Com­plete­ly Restores a Dam­aged Paint­ing: A Short, Med­i­ta­tive Doc­u­men­tary

Watch the Renais­sance Paint­ing, The Bat­tle of San Romano, Get Brought Beau­ti­ful­ly to Life in a Hand-Paint­ed Ani­ma­tion

Free Course: An Intro­duc­tion to the Art of the Ital­ian Renais­sance

– Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the author of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo and Cre­ative, Not Famous Activ­i­ty Book. 

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40,000-Year-Old Symbols Found in Caves Worldwide May Be the Earliest Written Language

in History, Language Lessons | September 17th, 2025

We may take it for grant­ed that the ear­li­est writ­ing sys­tems devel­oped with the Sume­ri­ans around 3400 B.C.E. The archae­o­log­i­cal evi­dence so far sup­ports the the­o­ry. But it may also be pos­si­ble that the ear­li­est writ­ing sys­tems pre­date 5000-year-old cuneiform tablets by sev­er­al thou­sand years. And what’s more, it may be pos­si­ble, sug­gests pale­oan­thro­pol­o­gist Genevieve von Pet­zinger, that those pre­his­toric forms of writ­ing, which include the ear­li­est known hash­tag marks, con­sist­ed of sym­bols near­ly as uni­ver­sal as emo­ji.

The study of sym­bols carved into cave walls all over the world—including pen­ni­forms (feath­er shapes), clav­i­forms (key shapes), and hand stencils—could even­tu­al­ly push us to “aban­don the pow­er­ful nar­ra­tive,” writes Frank Jacobs at Big Think, “of his­to­ry as total dark­ness until the Sume­ri­ans flip the switch.” Though the sym­bols may nev­er be tru­ly deci­pher­able, their pur­pos­es obscured by thou­sands of years of sep­a­ra­tion in time, they clear­ly show humans “undim­ming the light many mil­len­nia ear­li­er.”

While bur­row­ing deep under­ground to make cave paint­ings of ani­mals, ear­ly humans as far back as 40,000 years ago also devel­oped a sys­tem of signs that is remark­ably con­sis­tent across and between con­ti­nents. Von Pet­zinger spent years cat­a­logu­ing these sym­bols in Europe, vis­it­ing “52 caves,” reports New Scientist’s Ali­son George, “in France, Spain, Italy and Por­tu­gal. The sym­bols she found ranged from dots, lines, tri­an­gles, squares and zigza­gs to more com­plex forms like lad­der shapes, hand sten­cils, some­thing called a tec­ti­form that looks a bit like a post with a roof, and feath­er shapes called pen­ni­forms.”

She dis­cov­ered 32 signs found all over the con­ti­nent, carved and paint­ed over a very long peri­od of time. “For tens of thou­sands of years,” Jacobs points out, “our ances­tors seem to have been curi­ous­ly con­sis­tent with the sym­bols they used.” Von Pet­zinger sees this sys­tem as a car­ry­over from mod­ern humans’ migra­tion into Europe from Africa. “This does not look like the start-up phase of a brand-new inven­tion,” she writes in her book The First Signs: Unlock­ing the mys­ter­ies of the world’s old­est sym­bols.

In her TED Talk at the top, von Pet­zinger describes this ear­ly sys­tem of com­mu­ni­ca­tion through abstract signs as a pre­cur­sor to the “glob­al net­work of infor­ma­tion exchange” in the mod­ern world. “We’ve been build­ing on the men­tal achieve­ments of those who came before us for so long,” she says, “that it’s easy to for­get that cer­tain abil­i­ties haven’t already exist­ed,” long before the for­mal writ­ten records we rec­og­nize. These sym­bols trav­eled: they aren’t only found in caves, but also etched into deer teeth strung togeth­er in an ancient neck­lace.

Von Pet­zinger believes, writes George, that “the sim­ple shapes rep­re­sent a fun­da­men­tal shift in our ances­tors’ men­tal skills,” toward using abstract sym­bols to com­mu­ni­cate. Not every­one agrees with her. As the Brad­shaw Foun­da­tion notes, when it comes to the Euro­pean sym­bols, emi­nent pre­his­to­ri­an Jean Clottes argues “the signs in the caves are always (or near­ly always) asso­ci­at­ed with ani­mal fig­ures and thus can­not be said to be the first steps toward sym­bol­ism.”

Of course, it’s also pos­si­ble that both the signs and the ani­mals were meant to con­vey ideas just as a writ­ten lan­guage does. So argues MIT lin­guist Cora Lesure and her co-authors in a paper pub­lished in Fron­tiers in Psy­chol­o­gy last year. Cave art might show ear­ly humans “con­vert­ing acoustic sounds into draw­ings,” notes Sarah Gibbens at Nation­al Geo­graph­ic. Lesure says her research “sug­gests that the cog­ni­tive mech­a­nisms nec­es­sary for the devel­op­ment of cave and rock art are like­ly to be anal­o­gous to those employed in the expres­sion of the sym­bol­ic think­ing required for lan­guage.”

In oth­er words, under her the­o­ry, “cave and rock [art] would rep­re­sent a modal­i­ty of lin­guis­tic expres­sion.” And the sym­bols sur­round­ing that art might rep­re­sent an elab­o­ra­tion on the theme. The very first sys­tem of writ­ing, shared by ear­ly humans all over the world for tens of thou­sands of years.

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

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Trac­ing Eng­lish Back to Its Old­est Known Ances­tor: An Intro­duc­tion to Pro­to-Indo-Euro­pean

Was a 32,000-Year-Old Cave Paint­ing the Ear­li­est Form of Cin­e­ma?

How to Write in Cuneiform, the Old­est Writ­ing Sys­tem in the World: A Short, Charm­ing Intro­duc­tion

Dic­tio­nary of the Old­est Writ­ten Language–It Took 90 Years to Com­plete, and It’s Now Free Online

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. 

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How a 19th Century Scientist Created Incredibly Realistic 3D Models of the Moon (1874)

in History, Science | September 17th, 2025

At the moment, there’s no bet­ter way to see any­thing in space than through the lens of the James Webb Space Tele­scope. Pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture, that ten-bil­lion-dol­lar suc­ces­sor to the Hub­ble Space Tele­scope can see unprece­dent­ed­ly far out into space, which, in effect, means it can see unprece­dent­ed­ly far back in time: some 13.5 bil­lion years, in fact, to the state of the ear­ly uni­verse. We post­ed the first pho­tos tak­en by the James Webb Space Tele­scope in 2022, which showed us dis­tant galax­ies and neb­u­lae at a lev­el of detail in which they’d nev­er been seen before.

Such images would scarce­ly have been imag­in­able to James Nas­myth, though he might have fore­seen that they would one day be a real­i­ty. A man of many inter­ests, he seems to have pur­sued them all dur­ing the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry through which he lived in its near-entire­ty.

His inven­tion of the steam ham­mer, which turned out to be a great boon to the ship­build­ing indus­try, did its part to make pos­si­ble his ear­ly retire­ment. At that point, he was freed to pur­sue such pas­sions as astron­o­my and pho­tog­ra­phy, and in 1874, he pub­lished with co-author James Car­pen­ter a book that occu­pied the inter­sec­tion of those fields.

The Moon: Con­sid­ered as a Plan­et, a World, and a Satel­lite con­tains what still look like strik­ing­ly detailed pho­tos of the sur­face of that famil­iar but then-still-mys­te­ri­ous heav­en­ly body: quite a coup at the time, con­sid­er­ing that the tech­nol­o­gy for tak­ing pic­tures through a tele­scope had yet to be invent­ed. Nas­myth did use a tele­scope — one he made him­self — but only as a ref­er­ence in order to sketch “the moon’s scarred, cratered and moun­tain­ous sur­face,” writes Ned Pen­nant-Rea at the Pub­lic Domain Review. “He then built plas­ter mod­els based on the draw­ings, and pho­tographed these against black back­grounds in the full glare of the sun.”

In the book’s text, Nas­myth and Car­pen­ter showed a cer­tain sci­en­tif­ic pre­science with their obser­va­tions on such phe­nom­e­na as the “stu­pen­dous reser­voir of pow­er that the tidal waters con­sti­tute.” You can read the first edi­tion at the Inter­net Archive, and you can see more of its pho­tographs at the Pub­lic Domain Review. Com­pare them to pic­tures of the actu­al moon, and you’ll notice that he got a good deal right about the look of its sur­face, espe­cial­ly giv­en the tools he had to work with at the time. There’s even a sense in which Nas­myth’s pho­tos look more real than the 100 per­cent faith­ful images we have now, that they vivid­ly rep­re­sent some­thing of the moon’s essence. As mil­lions of dis­ap­point­ed view­ers of CGI-sat­u­rat­ed mod­ern sci-fi movies under­stand, some­times only mod­els feel right.

via Pub­lic Domain Review

Relat­ed con­tent:

The First Sur­viv­ing Pho­to­graph of the Moon (1840)

The Very First Pic­ture of the Far Side of the Moon, Tak­en 60 Years Ago

The Full Rota­tion of the Moon: A Beau­ti­ful, High Res­o­lu­tion Time Lapse Film

The Evo­lu­tion of the Moon: 4.5 Bil­lions Years in 2.6 Min­utes

The Ulti­mate Full Moon Shot

A Trip to the Moon (1902): The First Great Sci-Fi Film

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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When Michelangelo Created Artistic Designs for Military Fortifications to Protect Florence (1529–1530)

in Art, History | September 16th, 2025

Michelan­ge­lo was born in the Repub­lic of Flo­rence, with the tal­ent of… well, Michelan­ge­lo. Giv­en those begin­nings, it would have been prac­ti­cal­ly impos­si­ble for him to avoid entan­gle­ment with the House of Medici, the bank­ing fam­i­ly and polit­i­cal dynasty that ruled over Flo­rence for the bet­ter part of three cen­turies. By the time of Michelan­gelo’s birth, in 1475, the Medici had been in pow­er for four decades. At the age of four­teen, he was tak­en in by Loren­zo de’ Medici, known as “il Mag­nifi­co,” in whose house­hold he received artis­tic train­ing as well as philo­soph­i­cal knowl­edge and polit­i­cal con­nec­tions.

It was with Loren­zo’s death in 1492 that this first streak of Medici dom­i­nance ran into chop­py waters. When the fam­i­ly was expelled from Flo­rence two years lat­er, Michelan­ge­lo took his leave as well, begin­ning the peri­od of his career in which he would sculpt both the Pietà and the David.

Only in 1512 (after var­i­ous trou­bles in Flo­rence that includ­ed the four-year theoc­ra­cy of Savonaro­la) were the Medici restored to pow­er, but they also had the papa­cy: the Medici popes Leo X and Clement VII com­mis­sioned a great deal of work from Michelan­ge­lo, though he sel­dom saw eye-to-eye with those par­tic­u­lar patrons.

When Flo­rence rebelled against the Medici in the late fif­teen-twen­ties, Michelan­ge­lo took the side of the repub­li­cans. Their gov­ern­ment select­ed him as one of the “Nine of the Mili­tias” meant to design for­ti­fi­ca­tions for the threat­ened city (a resump­tion of ear­li­er, aban­doned Medici plans) in 1526, and before long appoint­ed him gov­er­na­tore gen­erale. It was in that capac­i­ty that he drew the sketch­es seen here, which con­sti­tute his plans for a set of for­ti­fi­ca­tions against the Medici-backed siege that spanned 1529 and 1530. How­ev­er artis­ti­cal­ly strik­ing, their designs were nev­er actu­al­ly built, at least not in any­thing like their entire­ty.

As it hap­pened, Michelan­ge­lo had backed the wrong horse: the siege was ulti­mate­ly suc­cess­ful, and the Medici retook pow­er under the aegis of Holy Roman emper­or Charles V. This put the artist in a dif­fi­cult posi­tion, and for a peri­od of months he was forced to go into hid­ing. With his death sen­tence in effect, he lay low in a small cham­ber beneath the Basil­i­ca of San Loren­zo, now part of the Medici Chapels Muse­um, whose walls are cov­ered in draw­ings, pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture, in his unmis­tak­able hand. The artis­tic skills he’d kept sharp dur­ing that peri­od of inter­nal exile would prob­a­bly have kept serv­ing him well enough in Flo­rence after Clement VII guar­an­teed his safe­ty there. But it seems he’d had enough Flo­ren­tine intrigue for one life­time, the rest of which he wise­ly opt­ed to spend in Rome.

via BLDGBLOG

Relat­ed con­tent:

A Secret Room with Draw­ings Attrib­uted to Michelan­ge­lo Opens to Vis­i­tors in Flo­rence

How Michelangelo’s David Still Draws Admi­ra­tion and Con­tro­ver­sy Today

New Video Shows What May Be Michelangelo’s Lost & Now Found Bronze Sculp­tures

Watch the Painstak­ing and Nerve-Rack­ing Process of Restor­ing a Draw­ing by Michelan­ge­lo

The Sis­tine Chapel: A $22,000 Art-Book Col­lec­tion Fea­tures Remark­able High-Res­o­lu­tion Views of the Murals of Michelan­ge­lo, Bot­ti­cel­li & Oth­er Renais­sance Mas­ters

Michelangelo’s Illus­trat­ed Gro­cery List

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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Albert Einstein Gives a Speech Praising Immigrants’ Contributions to America (1939)

in History | September 16th, 2025

There have been many times in Amer­i­can his­to­ry when cel­e­bra­tions of the country’s mul­ti-eth­nic, ever-chang­ing demog­ra­phy served as pow­er­ful coun­ter­weights to nar­row, exclu­sion­ary, nation­alisms. In 1855, for exam­ple, the pub­li­ca­tion of Brook­lyn native Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself offered a “pas­sion­ate embrace of equal­i­ty,” writes Kath­leen Kennedy Townsend, “the soul of democ­ra­cy.” We can con­trast the vibran­cy and dynamism of Whitman’s vision with the vio­lent nativism of the anti-immi­grant Know-Noth­ings, who reached their peak in the 1850s. The move­ment was found­ed by two oth­er New York­ers, gang leader William “Bill the Butch­er” Poole and writer Thomas R. Whit­ney, who asked in one of his polit­i­cal tracts, “What is equal­i­ty but stag­na­tion?”

Almost 100 years lat­er, we see anoth­er nation­al­ist move­ment tak­ing hold, not only in Europe, but in the States. Before the U.S. entered World War II, its views on Nation­al Social­ist Ger­many were decid­ed­ly ambiva­lent, with glow­ing por­traits of its leader pub­lished through­out the 30s, and a siz­able Nazi pres­ence in the U.S. From 1934 to 1939, for exam­ple, Ger­man groups in the U.S. orga­nized mas­sive ral­lies in Madi­son Square Gar­den. Addi­tion­al­ly, the Ger­man-Amer­i­can Bund pro­mot­ed the Nazi Par­ty through­out the U.S. with 70 dif­fer­ent local chap­ters. These orga­ni­za­tions held Nazi fam­i­ly and sum­mer camps in New Jer­sey, Wis­con­sin, Penn­syl­va­nia…. “There were forced march­es in the mid­dle of the night to bon­fires,” says his­to­ri­an Arnie Bern­stein, “where the kids would sing the Nazi nation­al anthem and shout ‘Sieg Heil.’”

Need­less to say, these scenes made a num­ber of minor­i­ty groups and immi­grants par­tic­u­lar­ly ner­vous, espe­cial­ly Jews who had just escaped from Europe. One such immi­grant, physi­cist Albert Ein­stein, had made the U.S. his per­ma­nent home in 1933 when he accept­ed a posi­tion at Prince­ton after liv­ing as a refugee in Eng­land. He would go on to become a force­ful advo­cate for equal­i­ty in the U.S., speak­ing out against the racial caste sys­tem of seg­re­ga­tion. In 1940, Ein­stein gave a lit­tle-known speech at the New York World’s Fair to inau­gu­rate an exhib­it that paid “homage to the diver­si­ty of the U.S. pop­u­la­tion.” On the dis­play, called the “Wall of Fame,” were inscribed “the names and pro­fes­sions of hun­dreds of the nation’s most notable ‘immi­grants, Negroes and Amer­i­can Indi­ans.’” (See the first page of the typed list above, and the full list here.)

Ein­stein’s speech comes to us via Speech­es of Note, a sib­ling of two favorite sites of ours, Let­ters of Note and Lists of Note. Below, you can read the full tran­script of the speech, in which Einstein—having adopt­ed the coun­try as it had adopt­ed him—-declaims, “these, too, belong to us, and we are glad and grate­ful to acknowl­edge the debt that the com­mu­ni­ty owes them.”

It is a fine and high-mind­ed idea, also in the best sense a proud one, to erect at the World’s Fair a wall of fame to immi­grants and Negroes of dis­tinc­tion.

The sig­nif­i­cance of the ges­ture is this: it says: These, too, belong to us, and we are glad and grate­ful to acknowl­edge the debt that the com­mu­ni­ty owes them. And focus­ing on these par­tic­u­lar con­trib­u­tors, Negroes and immi­grants, shows that the com­mu­ni­ty feels a spe­cial need to show regard and affec­tion for those who are often regard­ed as step-chil­dren of the nation—for why else this com­bi­na­tion?

If, then, I am to speak on the occa­sion, it can only be to say some­thing on behalf of these step-chil­dren. As for the immi­grants, they are the only ones to whom it can be account­ed a mer­it to be Amer­i­cans. For they have had to take trou­ble for their cit­i­zen­ship, where­as it has cost the major­i­ty noth­ing at all to be born in the land of civic free­dom.

As for the Negroes, the coun­try has still a heavy debt to dis­charge for all the trou­bles and dis­abil­i­ties it has laid on the Negro’s shoul­ders, for all that his fel­low-cit­i­zens have done and to some extent still are doing to him. To the Negro and his won­der­ful songs and choirs, we are indebt­ed for the finest con­tri­bu­tion in the realm of art which Amer­i­ca has so far giv­en to the world. And this great gift we owe, not to those whose names are engraved on this “Wall of Fame,” but to the chil­dren of the peo­ple, blos­som­ing name­less­ly as the lilies of the field.

In a way, the same is true of the immi­grants. They have con­tributed in their way to the flow­er­ing of the com­mu­ni­ty, and their indi­vid­ual striv­ing and suf­fer­ing have remained unknown.

One more thing I would say with regard to immi­gra­tion gen­er­al­ly: There exists on the sub­ject a fatal mis­com­pre­hen­sion. Unem­ploy­ment is not decreased by restrict­ing immi­gra­tion. For unem­ploy­ment depends on faulty dis­tri­b­u­tion of work among those capa­ble of work. Immi­gra­tion increas­es con­sump­tion as much as it does demand on labor. Immi­gra­tion strength­ens not only the inter­nal econ­o­my of a sparse­ly pop­u­lat­ed coun­try, but also its defen­sive pow­er.

The Wall of Fame arose out of a high-mind­ed ide­al; it is cal­cu­lat­ed to stim­u­late just and mag­nan­i­mous thoughts and feel­ings. May it work to that effect.

The speech is remark­able for its egal­i­tar­i­an­ism. The exhib­it works more or less as a “who’s who” of notable personalities—all of them men. Of course, Ein­stein him­self was one of the most notable immi­grants of the age. And yet, his ethos is Whit­man­ian, cel­e­brat­ing the mul­ti­tudes of labor­ers and artists “blos­som­ing name­less­ly” and those who have “remained unknown.” The coun­try, Ein­stein sug­gests, could not pos­si­bly be itself with­out its diver­si­ty of peo­ple and cul­tures. That same year, Ein­stein would pass his cit­i­zen­ship test, and explain in a radio broad­cast, “Why I am an Amer­i­can.” 

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2017.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Albert Ein­stein Explains How Slav­ery Has Crip­pled Everyone’s Abil­i­ty (Even Aristotle’s) to Think Clear­ly About Racism

20,000 Amer­i­cans Hold a Pro-Nazi Ral­ly in Madi­son Square Gar­den in 1939: Chill­ing Video Re-Cap­tures a Lost Chap­ter in US His­to­ry

Albert Ein­stein Express­es His Admi­ra­tion for Mahat­ma Gand­hi, in Let­ter and Audio

Rare Audio: Albert Ein­stein Explains “Why I Am an Amer­i­can” on Day He Pass­es Cit­i­zen­ship Test (1940)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. 

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Everything That Went Wrong During The Wizard of Oz’s Seriously Troubled Production

in Film, History | September 15th, 2025

The Wiz­ard of Oz is now show­ing at Las Vegas’ Sphere. Or a ver­sion of it is, at any rate, and not one that meets with the approval of all the pic­ture’s count­less fans. “The beloved 1939 film star­ring Judy Gar­land, wide­ly con­sid­ered one of the great­est Hol­ly­wood clas­sics, has been stretched and mor­phed and adapt­ed to fit the enor­mous dome-shaped venue,” writes the New York Times’ Alis­sa Wilkin­son. This entailed an exten­sion “upward and out­ward with the help of A.I. as well as visu­al effects artists. The cool tor­na­do cre­at­ed by Arnold Gille­spie for the orig­i­nal has been trad­ed for some­thing dig­i­tal, and even­tu­al­ly you can’t see it at all, because you’re inside the fun­nel. New per­for­mances and vis­tas have also been gen­er­at­ed,” which is “at best ques­tion­able” eth­i­cal­ly, to say noth­ing of the aes­thet­ics.

Yet even giv­en the con­sid­er­able mod­i­fi­ca­tions to — and exci­sions from — the orig­i­nal film, “most audi­ences will glad­ly over­look all of this, wowed by the sheer scale of the spec­ta­cle.” The Wiz­ard of Oz has, as has often been said, the kind of “mag­ic” that endures through even great defi­cien­cies in pre­sen­ta­tion.

That qual­i­ty first became appar­ent in 1956, sev­en­teen years after the movie’s release in cin­e­mas, when it first aired on tele­vi­sion. Though the dra­mat­ic tran­si­tion from black-and-white to col­or would have been lost on most home view­ers at the time, “45 mil­lion peo­ple tuned in, far more than those who had seen it in the­aters,” says the nar­ra­tor of the It Was A Sh*t Show video above. Anoth­er broad­cast, in 1959, did even bet­ter, and there­after The Wiz­ard of Oz became an “annu­al must-see event” on TV, which even­tu­al­ly made it “the most-watched film in his­to­ry.”

That sta­tus jus­ti­fies the movie’s infa­mous­ly trou­bled pro­duc­tion, which is the video’s cen­tral sub­ject. From its numer­ous rewrites all the way through to its fee­ble box office per­for­mance, The Wiz­ard of Oz encoun­tered severe dif­fi­cul­ties every step of the way, which gave rise to rumors that con­tin­ue to haunt it: that an actor died from poi­son make­up, for exam­ple, or that one of the munchkins com­mit­ted sui­cide in view of the cam­era. While the pro­duc­tion caused no fatal­i­ties — at least not direct­ly — it did come close more than once, to say noth­ing of the psy­cho­log­i­cal toll the com­bi­na­tion of high ambi­tion and per­sis­tent dys­func­tion must have tak­en on many, if not most, of its par­tic­i­pants. Even hear­ing enu­mer­at­ed only its clear­ly doc­u­ment­ed prob­lems is enough to make one won­der how the pic­ture was ever com­plet­ed in the first place. Yet now, 86 years lat­er, its Sphere rein­ter­pre­ta­tion is rak­ing in $2 mil­lion in tick­et sales per day: an act of wiz­ardry if ever there was one.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Watch the Ear­li­est Sur­viv­ing Filmed Ver­sion of The Wiz­ard of Oz (1910)

The Wiz­ard of Oz Bro­ken Apart and Put Back Togeth­er in Alpha­bet­i­cal Order

The Com­plete Wiz­ard of Oz Series, Avail­able as Free eBooks and Free Audio Books

Hear Wait­ing for Godot, the Acclaimed 1956 Pro­duc­tion Star­ring The Wiz­ard of Oz’s Bert Lahr

Watch the Sesame Street Episode Banned for Being Too Scary, Fea­tur­ing The Wiz­ard of Oz’s Wicked Witch of the West (1976)

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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Leonardo Da Vinci’s To-Do List from 1490: The Plan of a Renaissance Man

in Art, History | September 15th, 2025

Most people’s to-do lists are, almost by def­i­n­i­tion, pret­ty dull, filled with those quo­tid­i­an lit­tle tasks that tend to slip out of our minds. Pick up the laun­dry. Get that thing for the kid. Buy milk, canned yams and kumquats at the local mar­ket.

Leonar­do Da Vin­ci was, how­ev­er, no ordi­nary per­son. And his to-do lists were any­thing but dull.

Da Vin­ci would car­ry around a note­book, where he would write and draw any­thing that moved him. “It is use­ful,” Leonar­do once wrote, to “con­stant­ly observe, note, and con­sid­er.” Buried in one of these books, dat­ing back to around the 1490s, is a to-do list. And what a to-do list.

NPR’s Robert Krul­wich had it direct­ly trans­lat­ed. And while all of the list might not be imme­di­ate­ly clear, remem­ber that Da Vin­ci nev­er intend­ed for it to be read by web surfers 500  years in the future.

[Cal­cu­late] the mea­sure­ment of Milan and Sub­urbs

[Find] a book that treats of Milan and its church­es, which is to be had at the stationer’s on the way to Cor­du­sio

[Dis­cov­er] the mea­sure­ment of Corte Vec­chio (the court­yard in the duke’s palace).

[Dis­cov­er] the mea­sure­ment of the castel­lo (the duke’s palace itself)

Get the mas­ter of arith­metic to show you how to square a tri­an­gle.

Get Mess­er Fazio (a pro­fes­sor of med­i­cine and law in Pavia) to show you about pro­por­tion.

Get the Brera Fri­ar (at the Bene­dic­tine Monastery to Milan) to show you De Pon­deribus (a medieval text on mechan­ics)

[Talk to] Gian­ni­no, the Bom­bardier, re. the means by which the tow­er of Fer­rara is walled with­out loop­holes (no one real­ly knows what Da Vin­ci meant by this)

Ask Benedet­to Poti­nari (A Flo­ren­tine Mer­chant) by what means they go on ice in Flan­ders

Draw Milan

Ask Mae­stro Anto­nio how mor­tars are posi­tioned on bas­tions by day or night.

[Exam­ine] the Cross­bow of Mas­tro Gian­net­to

Find a mas­ter of hydraulics and get him to tell you how to repair a lock, canal and mill in the Lom­bard man­ner

[Ask about] the mea­sure­ment of the sun promised me by Mae­stro Gio­van­ni Francese

Try to get Vitolone (the medieval author of a text on optics), which is in the Library at Pavia, which deals with the math­e­mat­ic.

You can just feel Da Vinci’s vora­cious curios­i­ty and intel­lec­tu­al rest­less­ness. Note how many of the entries are about get­ting an expert to teach him some­thing, be it math­e­mat­ics, physics or astron­o­my. Also who casu­al­ly lists “draw Milan” as an ambi­tion?

Lat­er to-do lists, dat­ing around 1510, seemed to focus on Da Vinci’s grow­ing fas­ci­na­tion with anato­my. In a note­book filled with beau­ti­ful­ly ren­dered draw­ings of bones and vis­cera, he rat­tles off more tasks that need to get done. Things like get a skull, describe the jaw of a croc­o­dile and tongue of a wood­peck­er, assess a corpse using his fin­ger as a unit of mea­sure­ment.

On that same page, he lists what he con­sid­ers to be impor­tant qual­i­ties of an anatom­i­cal draughts­man. A firm com­mand of per­spec­tive and a knowl­edge of the inner work­ings of the body are key. So is hav­ing a strong stom­ach.

You can see a page of Da Vinci’s note­book above but be warned. Even if you are con­ver­sant in 16th cen­tu­ry Ital­ian, Da Vin­ci wrote every­thing in mir­ror script.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in Decem­ber, 2014.

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!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Leonar­do da Vinci’s Hand­writ­ten Resume (Cir­ca 1482)

Thomas Edison’s Huge­ly Ambi­tious “To-Do” List from 1888

Umber­to Eco Explains Why We Make Lists

John­ny Cash’s Short and Per­son­al To-Do List

Jonathan Crow is a writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. 

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The Horrifying Paintings of Francis Bacon

in Art, History, Religion | September 12th, 2025

Men­tion Fran­cis Bacon, and you some­times have to clar­i­fy which one you mean: the twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry painter, or the sev­en­teenth-cen­tu­ry philoso­pher? Despite how much time sep­a­rat­ed their lives, the two men aren’t with­out their con­nec­tions. One may actu­al­ly have been a descen­dant of the oth­er, if you cred­it the artist’s father’s claim of rela­tion to the Eliz­a­bethan intel­lec­tu­al’s half-broth­er. Bet­ter doc­u­ment­ed is how the more recent Fran­cis Bacon made a con­nec­tion to the time of the more dis­tant one, by paint­ing his own ver­sions of Diego Velázquez’s Por­trait of Inno­cent X. We refer, of course, to his “scream­ing popes,” the sub­ject of the new Hochela­ga video above.

As Hochela­ga cre­ator Tom­mie Trelawny puts it, “no image cap­tured his imag­i­na­tion more” than Velázquez’s depic­tion of Pope Inno­cent X, which is “con­sid­ered to be one of the finest works in West­ern art.”

Bacon’s ver­sion from 1953, after he’d more than estab­lished him­self in the Eng­lish art scene, is “a ter­ri­ble and fright­en­ing inver­sion of the orig­i­nal. The Pope screams as if elec­tro­cut­ed in his gold­en throne. Vio­lent brush­strokes sweep across the can­vas like bars of a cage, strip­ping away all sense of grandeur and leav­ing only bru­tal­i­ty and pain.” In many ways, this har­row­ing image came as the nat­ur­al meet­ing of exist­ing cur­rents in Bacon’s work, which had already drawn from the his­to­ry of Chris­t­ian art and employed a vari­ety of anguished, iso­lat­ed fig­ures.

Unsur­pris­ing­ly, Bacon’s Study after Velázquez’s Por­trait of Pope Inno­cent X inspired all man­ner of con­tro­ver­sy. The artist him­self denied all inter­pre­ta­tions of its sup­posed impli­ca­tions, insist­ing that “recre­at­ing this papal por­trait was sim­ply an aes­thet­ic choice: art for the sake of art.” In any case, he fol­lowed it up with about 50 more scream­ing popes, each of which “embod­ies a dif­fer­ent facet of human dark­ness.” These and the many oth­er works of art Bacon cre­at­ed pro­lif­i­cal­ly until his death in 1992 reflect what seems to have been his own trou­bled soul and per­pet­u­al­ly dis­or­dered life. His style changed over the decades, becom­ing some­what soft­er and less aggres­sive­ly dis­turb­ing, sug­gest­ing that his demons may have gone into at least par­tial retreat. But could any­one capa­ble of paint­ing the scream­ing popes ever tru­ly have lost touch with the abyss?

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Bril­liant­ly Night­mar­ish Art & Trou­bled Life of Painter Fran­cis Bacon

Fran­cis Bacon on The South Bank Show: A Sin­gu­lar Pro­file of the Sin­gu­lar Painter

William Bur­roughs Meets Fran­cis Bacon: See Nev­er-Broad­cast Footage (1982)

The “Dark Relics” of Chris­tian­i­ty: Pre­served Skulls, Blood & Oth­er Grim Arti­facts

The Scream Explained: What’s Real­ly Hap­pen­ing in Edvard Munch’s World-Famous Paint­ing

When There Were Three Popes at Once: An Ani­mat­ed Video Drawn in the Style of Medieval Illu­mi­nat­ed Man­u­script

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 Earliest Known Appearance of the F‑Word (1310)

in English Language | September 11th, 2025

Pho­to by Paul Booth

You val­ue deco­rum, pro­pri­ety, elo­quence, you trea­sure le mot juste and ago­nize over dic­tion as you com­pose polite but strong­ly-word­ed let­ters to the edi­tor. But alas, my lit­er­ate friend, you have the mis­for­tune of liv­ing in the age of Twit­ter, Tum­blr, et al., where the favored means of com­mu­ni­ca­tion con­sists of ready­made mimet­ic words and phras­es, pho­tos, videos, and ani­mat­ed gifs. World lead­ers trade insults like 5th graders—some of them do not know how to spell. Respect­ed sci­en­tists and jour­nal­ists debate anony­mous strangers with car­toon avatars and work-unsafe pseu­do­nyms. Some of them are robots.

What to do?

Embrace it. Insert well-placed pro­fan­i­ties into your com­mu­niqués. Indulge in bawdi­ness and rib­aldry. You may notice that you are doing no more than writ­ers have done for cen­turies, from Rabelais to Shake­speare to Voltaire. Pro­fan­i­ty has evolved right along­side, not apart from, lit­er­ary his­to­ry. T.S. Eliot, for exam­ple, knew how to go low­brow with the best of them, and gets cred­it for the first record­ed use of the word “bull­shit.” As for anoth­er, even more fre­quent­ly used epi­thet in 24-hour online commentary?—well, the word “F*ck” has a far longer his­to­ry.

Not long ago we alert­ed you to the first known use of the ver­sa­tile obscen­i­ty in a 1528 mar­gin­al note scrib­bled in Cicero’s De Offici­is by a monk curs­ing his abbot. Not long after this dis­cov­ery, notes Medievalists.net, anoth­er schol­ar found the word in a 1475 poem called Flen fly­ys. This was thought to be the ear­li­est appear­ance of “f*ck” as a pure­ly sex­u­al ref­er­ence until medieval his­to­ri­an Paul Booth of Keele Uni­ver­si­ty dis­cov­ered an instance dat­ing over a hun­dred years ear­li­er. Rather than with­in, or next to, a work of lit­er­a­ture, how­ev­er, the word appears in a set of 1310 Eng­lish court records. And no, it is decid­ed­ly not a legal term.

The doc­u­ments con­cern the case of “a man named Roger Fucke­bythenavele.” Used three times in the record, the name, says Booth, is prob­a­bly not a joke made by the scribe but some kind of bizarre nick­name, though one hopes not a descrip­tion of the crime. “Either it refers to an inex­pe­ri­enced cop­u­la­tor, refer­ring to some­one try­ing to have sex with a navel,” says Booth, stat­ing the obvi­ous, “or it’s a rather extrav­a­gant expla­na­tion for a dimwit, some­one so stu­pid they think that this is the way to have sex.” Our medieval gent had oth­er prob­lems as well. He was called to court three times with­in a year before being pro­nounced “out­lawed,” which The Inde­pen­dent’s Loul­la-Mae Eleft­he­ri­ou-Smith sug­gests exe­cu­tion but prob­a­bly refers to ban­ish­ment.

For the word to have such casu­al­ly hilar­i­ous or insult­ing cur­ren­cy in the ear­ly 14th cen­tu­ry, it must have come from an even ear­li­er time. Indeed, “f*ck is a word of Ger­man ori­gin,” notes Jesse Shei­d­low­er, author of an ety­mo­log­i­cal his­to­ry called The F Word, “relat­ed to words in sev­er­al oth­er Ger­man­ic lan­guages, such as Dutch, Ger­man, and Swedish, that have sex­u­al mean­ings as well as mean­ing such as ‘to strike’ or ‘to move back and forth’” (nat­u­ral­ly). So, in oth­er words, it’s just a word. But in this case it might have also been a weapon, Booth spec­u­lates, wield­ed “by a revenge­ful for­mer girl­friend. Four­teenth-cen­tu­ry revenge porn per­haps…” If that’s not evi­dence for you that the present may not be unlike the past, then maybe take note of the appear­ance of the word “twerk” in 1820.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2017.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Young T.S. Eliot Writes “The Tri­umph of Bullsh*t” and Gives the Eng­lish Lan­guage a New Exple­tive (1910)

Peo­ple Who Swear Are More Hon­est Than Those Who Don’t, Finds a New Uni­ver­si­ty Study

Steven Pinker Explains the Neu­ro­science of Swear­ing (NSFW)

Stephen Fry, Lan­guage Enthu­si­ast, Defends The “Unnec­es­sary” Art Of Swear­ing

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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The Technology That Brought Down Medieval Castles and Changed the Middle Ages

in Architecture, History | September 11th, 2025

Civ­i­liza­tion moved past the use of cas­tles long ago, but their imagery endures in pop­u­lar cul­ture. Even young chil­dren here in the twen­ty-twen­ties have an idea of what cas­tles look like. But why do they look like that? Admit­ted­ly, that’s a bit of a trick ques­tion: the pop­u­lar con­cept of cas­tles tends to be inspired by medieval exam­ples, but in his­tor­i­cal fact, the design of cas­tles changed sub­stan­tial­ly over time, albeit slow­ly at first. You can hear that process explained in the Get to the Point video above, which tells the sto­ry of “star forts,” the built response to the “tech­nol­o­gy that end­ed the Mid­dle Ages.”

You may be famil­iar with the con­cept of “motte and bai­ley,” now most wide­ly under­stood as a metaphor for a cer­tain debate tac­tic irri­tat­ing­ly preva­lent on the inter­net. But it actu­al­ly refers to a style of cas­tle con­struct­ed in Europe between the tenth and the thir­teenth cen­turies, con­sist­ing of a for­ti­fied hill­top keep, or “motte,” with a less defen­si­ble walled court­yard, or “bai­ley,” below. In case of an attack, the bat­tle could pri­mar­i­ly take place down in the bai­ley, with retreats to the motte occur­ring when strate­gi­cal­ly nec­es­sary. The motte-and-bai­ley cas­tle is a “great idea,” says the video’s nar­ra­tor, pro­vid­ed “you don’t have can­nons shoot­ing at you.”

Cas­tles, he explains, “were a reflec­tion of armies at the time: build a big wall, keep the bar­bar­ians out.” But once the can­non came on the scene, those once-prac­ti­cal­ly imper­vi­ous stone walls became a seri­ous lia­bil­i­ty. That was defin­i­tive­ly proven in 1453, when “the Ottomans famous­ly bat­tered down the great walls of Con­stan­tino­ple with their can­nons. That brought an end not only to the 1500-year-old Roman Empire, but also to the Mid­dle Ages as an era entire­ly.” In response, cas­tle archi­tects added dirt slopes, or glacis, at the edges, as well as cir­cu­lar bas­tions to deflect can­non fire at the cor­ners — which, incon­ve­nient­ly, cre­at­ed “dead zones” in which ene­my sol­diers could hide, pro­tect­ed from any defens­es launched from with­in the cas­tle.

The solu­tion was to make the bas­tions tri­an­gu­lar instead, and then to add fur­ther tri­an­gu­lar struc­tures between them. Seen from the side, cas­tles became much low­er and wider; from above, they grew ever pointier and more com­plex in shape. Sébastien Le Pre­stre, Mar­quis of Vauban, an army offi­cer under Louis XIV, became the acknowl­edged mas­ter of this form, the trace ital­i­enne. You may not know his name, but his designs made France “lit­er­al­ly impos­si­ble to invade.” For sheer beau­ty, how­ev­er, it would be hard to top the plans for star forts to defend Flo­rence in the fif­teen-twen­ties by a mul­ti-tal­ent­ed artist named Michelan­ge­lo. Per­haps you’ve heard of him?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

Leonar­do da Vin­ci Draws Designs of Future War Machines: Tanks, Machine Guns & More

How to Build a 13th-Cen­tu­ry Cas­tle, Using Only Authen­tic Medieval Tools & Tech­niques

A For­got­ten 16th-Cen­tu­ry Man­u­script Reveals the First Designs for Mod­ern Rock­ets

Behold a 21st-Cen­tu­ry Medieval Cas­tle Being Built with Only Tools & Mate­ri­als from the Mid­dle Ages

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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