Archaeologists have long known that the ancient peoples of North America—not unlike us—played a lot of games. Going back millennia, cultures around the world developed myriad ways to keep entertained, and for a long time, it was thought that the first dice ever used could be traced to the ancient Eastern European and Near East cultures of Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, and the Caucasus. But according to a new paper by Robert Madden, published by Cambridge University Press, games of chance developed much, much earlier than originally thought—halfway around the world.

Researchers previously believed that the earliest dice originated about 5,500 years ago, but Madden shares that examples excavated in North America date back as far as the Late Pleistocene—the Ice Age. Among the oldest reported examples are a few found in modern-day Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico. The rich archaeological sites in these places are associated with the Folsom Culture, representing a dispersed hunter-gatherer lifeway that extended across the North American West, Southwest, and Great Plains around 12,000 years ago.

“The dice tend to show up in liminal spaces where you have a lot of high mobility,” Madden told Live Science. “It might have something to do with how separated these people are and the need to relate to people you don’t see very often.”

In the report, Madden also says that “the making and using of dice represent humans’ first known efforts to intentionally generate, observe, and record streams of controlled, random events…” He adds that, possibly for the first time, people were comprehending patterns or regularities in probability—a kind of precursor to understanding what we now call the law of large numbers. Anthropologists consider this to be “a crucial early step in humanity’s evolving discovery and understanding of randomness and the probabilistic nature of the universe.”

Madden compared hundreds of examples found across the American West with a comprehensive, several-hundred-page publication called Games of the North American Indians, published in 1907 as part of an annual report by the Bureau of American Ethnology. It’s currently available in a two-volume edition from Bison Books.

You might also enjoy seeing what may be the world’s oldest crayon.

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China’s medieval Tang Dynasty, which spanned 618 to 907 C.E., was something of a golden age in the nation’s long and storied history. The realm’s territory expanded while governmental stability helped to ensure relative peace, and trade routes like the Silk Road were kept relatively safe. And as people enjoyed more exposure to materials and styles from other parts of the world, the arts of this era reflected curiosity about new techniques and forms.

The advent of modern paper can be traced to China a little more than 2,000 years ago, so it’s fitting that a unique archaeological discovery in the Mogao Caves at Dunhuang contained some strikingly well-preserved paper artifacts. The area is also often referred to as the Valley of the Thousand Buddhas, where overland trade between China and the West via the Silk Road led to a commercial and cultural intersection.

Among the Mogao Caves’ nearly 500 surviving chambers and temples, which are filled with statuary and wall paintings spanning a millennia of Buddhist art, one particular space known as Cave 17 revealed some extraordinary objects. It was excavated in the early 1900s by an archaeologist named Marc Aurel Stein.

Some 50,000 documents, textiles, and other objects emerged from the cavern, which had been sealed up some time during the 11th century. Among these were a series of cut and folded paper flowers, several of which are part of The Stein Textile Collection, stored at the British Museum and the V&A in London.

Loosely based on a square format, similar to other architectural rosettes of the period, the paper flowers were likely attached to a wall or some other substrate, as they still have a dab of glue on their reverse sides. And their characteristics vary greatly, from a relatively simple painted composition to layered floral designs made with a range of paper thicknesses.

While the sheer number of Buddhist artworks, relics, and environments in Dunhuang is remarkable unto itself, the existence of the delicate florets, manuscripts, paintings, and other items created with organic materials marked an incredibly rare find. And while the flowers at the British Museum are not currently on display, if you want to take a look yourself, the piece below comprising nine flowers attached to a textile backing can be viewed by appointment at the V&A’s state-of-the-art East Storehouse.

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In the early 20th century, Russia underwent a series of drastic and devastating changes. After centuries of imperial rule, the 1917 Russian Revolution put an end to the Romanov dynasty and hailed the start of a new era under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin, head of the Bolshevik Party. This government body eventually became known as the Communist Party, and Russia was dubbed the Union of Soviet Social Republicans, or the U.S.S.R.

In 1927, everything changed again. Lenin died that year, and a new leader maneuvered into power: Joseph Stalin. Fundamentally a dictator, Stalin ruled through terror and used violence and oppressive tactics to instill a government-controlled society. His approach essentially defines totalitarianism, in which the state asserts absolute dominance over every aspect of people’s lives and livelihoods.

In 1937, 10 years into the Stalinist period, the short film “Father’s Letters” opens. Written and directed by Alexey Evstigneev, the animation traces a narrative of correspondence between a real-life father, Professor Vangengheim, and his daughter Eleonora, who he calls Elya.

Vangengheim was a weather forecaster for Stalin, and he headed up the U.S.S.R.’s meteorology department—a role that had great implications for the success of socialist agriculture practices. When a ruinous famine hit between 1932 and 1933, Vangengheim was scapegoated with a claim that he had falsified weather forecasts to sabotage the crops. In January 1934, he was arrested and transported to the remote Solovetsky Islands, near the Arctic Circle.

Eleonora, who lived in Moscow, witnessed nationalist demonstrations and was largely shielded from the knowledge that her father was banished to a remote outpost of the Soviet Gulag. In his letters, written on cigarette-rolling paper, Vangengheim details his “expedition,” describing how he is researching plant life in the Arctic. The real letters were preserved by Eleonora and later published.

The Gulag system was established shortly after the Russian Revolution, and Stalin actively expanded it. It’s estimated that around 18 million people passed through the Gulag, and more than than a quarter did not survive. The film’s emphasis on 1937 marks a particularly terrible time during Stalin’s rule known as the Great Purge, or the Great Terror, of which the sole purpose was eradicating people who disagreed with the dictator’s philosophy.

Those thought to be traitors of the state were arrested, imprisoned, and executed—often without trial—in a wholesale expulsion of people who threatened Communist ideals and Stalin’s absolute power. This included persecuting political rivals, bureaucrats, and intellectuals—because only the state could determine what information, art, or “truths” the public had access to.

Stalin’s secret police, known as the NKVD, officially counted more than 680,000 individuals who were shot between 1937 and 1938, but scholars estimate that the entire number of fatalities during the Great Purge could be double that.

For Evstigneev, this horrific period sets the stage for a poignant tale of love, innocence, and hope as well as a stark reflection of the cruelty of the Gulag. A team of animators and producers worked with the director to create a painterly world that combines hand-drawn pastel elements, a two-dimensional vector-based technique, and stop-motion.

While imprisoned, Vangengheim is forced to work on a portrait of Stalin made of dandelions, however when he damages the tribute, he meets a grisly fate. In real life, his family didn’t learn of his death until nearly two decades later.

In Evstigneev’s film, Elya reads of her father’s “explorations” in the north and is reminded of the life cycle of flowers and their floating seeds, encouraging her to focus on future growth. Find the film on Vimeo.

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The wealthy in society have been known to spare no expense when it comes to building palatial residences with impressively high-ceilinged rooms and enviable art collections. Visits to U.K. National Trust properties like Attingham Park in Shropshire and other historic estates serve as reminders of aristocratic obsessions with opulence and legacy, with their soaring ceilings and salon-style installations of portraits in wallpapered halls. But then, there’s also something ineffably satisfying about a room in miniature.

For Gretchen Scherer, centuries-old rooms in grand houses and institutions serve as the foundation for an ongoing series of paintings of luminous interiors. She starts with photos sourced online, from books, and that she snaps herself, in addition to drawing inspiration from artists like Narcissa Niblack Thorne, who commissioned meticulously crafted miniatures of period rooms to house her vast collection of 1:12-scale furniture. Scherer then tries to “open up” the space, as she describes it, toying a bit with perspective.

Scherer’s solo show Reading the Rooms, which opens next month at Richard Heller Gallery, adds to her repertoire of historic locations, such as U.K. National Trust properties and other European landmarks and museums. “In my work, there’s always been a tension between real life and the imagined,” she says in a statement. “Using places that are fixed and exist in the world, in a certain way, helps me to draw attention to this tension.”

The artist’s lively, illustrative paintings of historic rooms brim with paintings and period furnishings that transport us to earlier eras while emphasizing a bright, contemporary palette. Every object, be it a book, a candlestick, or a noble portrait above a mantle, is given equal attention, drawing our eye around the canvas like a two-dimensional cabinet of curiosities. There’s so much going on that one can imagine miniature compositions within the larger one, as doorways open up to further rooms and furniture is arranged around art displays.

“All the little paintings, sculptures, and furniture within the painting come from the actual collection and become the animated elements in an otherwise empty space,” Scherer says. “Some of the paintings in this show feel more empty and breathless and others feel very alive and playful. I think they oscillate between those two poles.”

Reading the Rooms opens February 21 and continues through March 21 in Santa Monica. See more on the artist’s Instagram.

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Combining a variety of fabrics, buttons, shells, and beads, Stephen Towns’ mixed-media textile pieces draw on the rich heritage of quilts made especially by Black women in the American South. Tableaux reminiscent of family portraits and vacation snapshots lend themselves to an exploration of the power of pleasure and community during an era when the South was still racially segregated.

Towns’ solo exhibition, Safer Waters: Picturing Black Recreation at Midcentury at the Wichita Art Museum, is an extension of the artist’s ongoing series exploring Black leisure in the era of Jim Crow.

Large-scale compositions sing with vibrant color, portraying families and groups of friends in the midst of dance parties, sunbathing, boating, and swimming at a resort in Florida called Paradise Park. It wasn’t until 1968, with the passing of the Civil Rights Act, that desegregation laws finally negated the need for Black-only businesses and destinations, and Paradise Park, which was advertised “for colored people,” closed in 1969.

Towns examines the nature of not only relaxation but escape, celebrating the vibrancy of Black joy despite a period of unabashed oppression toward people of color. He emphasizes child-like innocence, togetherness, and leisure as a form of resistance.

Safer Waters expands his ongoing body of work with the addition of seven new works, shown here. The exhibition continues through June 14, and you can see more by Towns on Instagram.

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In 1835, a tortoiseshell cat measuring more than three feet long was enough to warrant a small advertisement in a British newspaper that as “the greatest curiosity ever shown to the public,” it could be viewed at the Ship Tavern in London. Surely a pint of ale was the informal fee to view this extraordinary animal.

It was during the 18th and 19th centuries in Europe that cats became increasingly recognized as worthy pets, beyond their role as mousers. Breweries and distilleries often still “employ” a cat or two to keep the rodents out of the grain. From supernatural kaibyō in Japanese folklore to felines’ divine status in ancient Egypt, the animals have had an indelible influence on mythology, history, and our daily lives for a very long time.

Forthcoming from Phaidon, the book Cat celebrates, well, exactly what you’d expect. From contemporary sculpture and illustrations to early photography and internet memes, the volume runs the gamut of feline personalities and depictions in art throughout the millennia. Yet no matter how diverse the portrayals or how long ago they were created, the creatures’ expressiveness—even ridiculousness—is universally relatable.

Cat surveys an immense range of mediums and eras, from medieval illuminated manuscripts to modern street art. Colossal readers may be familiar with artists like Xuan Loc Xuan, Lee Sangsoo, and Utagawa Hiroshige, among many others, whose multimedia explorations of feline nature fill the playful tome.

Slated for release on February 11, Cat is available for pre-order in the Colossal Shop.

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In 1666, the marriage of Emperor Leopold I and Infanta Margarita Teresa of Spain solidified a political alliance between the Austrian and Spanish sides of the Habsburg family. They were also both uncle and niece and first cousins, such was the intense insularity of royal marriages intended to gain or maintain power across Europe.

The union was arranged while Margarita Teresa was very young—she was only around 15 when they married—and during the years leading up to the wedding, court painter Diego Velázquez created numerous portraits of her, which were sent to Leopold I in the form of tokens or updates documenting the imperial bride’s development into a young woman.

For Derrick Guild, portraits of the likes of the Infanta and the Spanish royal family, such as Velázquez’s seminal “Las Meninas,” provide the starting point for a painting practice that examines social status, mores, and expectations. Through 17th- and 18th-century portraits, Guild examines art as a vehicle for social and diplomatic relations, considering how painting was used to impart very specific messages and emphasize prestige.

His “Label Infanta Margarita, after Velazquez and del Mazo,” for example, reproduces a portrait of the Spanish princess across a gridded composition of paper luggage tags, nodding to the harsh reality that the young woman’s sole role in life was to essentially be shipped off to marry well and produce heirs.

Margarita Teresa had four children (and two miscarriages) during her six-year marriage to Leopold I. She died at the age of 22, and only one of her children lived to adulthood. The grid-like composition, set against a black background, also invokes a cage behind which the young woman is confined.

Tags are a recurring motif in Guild’s paintings, which combine trompe l’oeil details of paper and ribbon with intimate details of art historical pieces. In addition to the reference to shipping, they’re also evocative of labels used to identify and organize objects into place.

Guild is interested in the distortions and layered meanings of historic portraiture. Along with large-scale paintings, the artist also creates tender assemblies of smaller works in oval, gold frames, sometimes connected by gold-plated chains. Eyes are often encapsulated in their own frames, and it’s hard to escape the feeling of being watched.

These tiny, fragmented pieces also hone in on elegant hands, sensuous lips, jewelery, and fabrics, nodding to the tradition of painted miniatures. Often elaborately detailed for their size, these tiny portraits served as diplomatic gifts, keepsakes, tokens of love, and ways to commemorate people or events. They were a key element of introducing eligible men and women to prospective wives and husbands, and in aristocratic circles, social climbing was a not-so-hidden goal. Before photography, in the courtship scene, they were a kind of profile picture.

If you enjoy this work, you may also like Robyn Rich’s miniature eye pieces derived from Georgian portraits or the eccentric paintings of Volker Hermes, alongside whom Guild recently exhibited at James Freeman Gallery. See more on Guild’s work on Instagram.

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Before he was a titan of Renaissance art history, Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564) was a 12-year-old, although his childhood looked quite a bit different from what we associate with that age today. Already deeply invested in drawing and painting, he studied others’ work, such as an engraving titled “Saint Anthony Tormented by Demons,” created by 15th-century German artist Martin Schongauer. Unlike most tweens, though, when he set out to recreate the scene in tempera paint on a wood panel, he worked with a particular style that strongly hinted at the young boy’s preternatural talent.

This is the very first known painting by Michelangelo, titled “The Torment of Saint Anthony,” which was completed around 1487-88 at the age of 12 or 13. It wasn’t attributed to him until after the painting sold at auction in 2008 and a conservationist at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York removed yellowed varnish and some unskillful overpaint to reveal a unique color palette and attention to depth.

Art historians such as Everett Fahy, a longtime curator at The Met, asserted that the painting had been made by Michelangelo, even though when the work went to auction, it was attributed more generally to the large Florentine workshop of Domenico Ghirlandaio, with which Michelangelo joined as an apprentice in 1488.

Fahy’s convictions were bolstered by the unique composition that emerged after its restoration at the hands of conservator Michael Gallagher, backed by art historian and restorer Giorgio Bonsanti’s expert opinion that it was indeed made by Michelangelo.

With no one else able (at least yet) to provide credible enough evidence that it was not, the work was acquired by the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, making it the only painting by the Renaissance master in a public collection in North America.

“The rare subject is found in the life of Saint Anthony the Great, written by Athanasius of Alexandria in the 4th century, which describes how the Egyptian hermit-saint had a vision that he levitated into the air and was attacked by demons, whose torments he withstood,” says the Kimbell, adding that historians like Ascanio Condivi and Giorgio Vasari—Michelangelo’s contemporaries—recounted that “to give the demonic creatures veracity, he studied the colorful scales and other parts of specimens from the fish market.”

It’s possible that the famously exacting Michelangelo wouldn’t have chosen to have his name associated with this “amateur” work, which may help explain its attribution to the workshop instead. But for art historians and enthusiasts alike, it’s a wonderful insight into some of the artist’s earliest creative explorations.

Below, enjoy a video from art historian Erick Giraldo, who runs a channel called Inspiraggio on YouTube.

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In museums everywhere, collections departments are troves of historical objects, art, cultural artifacts, and scientific specimens. In our increasingly digital age, it’s easy to forget that in many cases, a good amount—sometimes even the majority—of records are documented in heavy, physical catalogues or accession registers. And over the course of decades or even centuries, labels can get damaged, items can go awol, or in the worst case scenario, fire or water damage can destroy these valuable resources.

In a sense, these analog databases are just as important as the objects they document, providing information about provenance and materials. In filing drawers, cases, and archival boxes, pieces are labeled one way or another. Archaeological potsherds, for example, may be labeled right on the piece with varnish and ink. At Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, tiny invertebrates are preserved alongside ornate, handwritten labels that harken back to our not-so-distant pre-digital age.

One problem with the old system of analog record-keeping is that access is limited, and only those most intimately acquainted with a particular collection may know that something is there at all. Finding items often requires some old fashioned sleuthing. But thanks to growing online resources, museums are increasingly working to make their holdings more accessible to both researchers and the public.

A new exhibition, Making the Invisible Visible: Digitizing Invertebrates on Microscope Slides, highlights Harvard’s diverse collection comprising more than 50,000 examples. Many are well over 100 years old, including a slide containing a soft coral specimen inscribed with, “sent to James Dwight Dana by Charles Darwin.” Some include whole insects, while others feature only wings or antennae.

The exhibition marks an extension of an ambitious project launched in 2024 to bring the collection into the 21st century by digitizing more than 3,000 specimens. This includes locating, restoring, rehousing, and capturing high-resolution images so that the collection can be published online for use by researchers around the world. Indeed, even the addition of QR code labels to the 19th-century objects is a thought-provoking juxtaposition of historical and contemporary archiving techniques. How will scientists use these another century from now?

Making the Invisible Visible is now on view at the Harvard Museum of Natural History in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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Humans have been creating pigments for thousands of years, foraging for local materials that could be ground or extracted to create colors. The 17,000-year-old cave art in Lascaux, France, for example, is a mindbogglingly early example of human ingenuity when it comes to processing elements of nature, such as minerals, ochres, and shells, to create different hues.

As time went on, people continued to experiment and develop new dyes and paints, some of which were poisonous. Minerals sometimes contain toxic elements, so red often contained lead, cinnabar had mercury, and orpiment arsenic. Aristocratic Romans even used a face-lightening compound containing lead, and their blush tended to feature crushed mulberries or red vermillion, a.k.a. powdered cinnabar.

In the medieval period, plants also became more valuable as a means of producing pigments, especially as trade routes expanded and botanicals from different parts of the world could be obtained or seeded in gardens. The colors we see in illuminated manuscripts and associate with dyed fabrics became increasingly desirable during this era.

Blue and purple can be extracted from woad, ivy, and Portuguese laurel, while golden hues can be made from cornflower, crocus, myrrh, turmeric, and more. In the forthcoming Gold from Newton’s Apple Tree: Historical Recipes for Natural Inks, Paints, and Dyes, author Nabil Ali celebrates this long legacy of botanical pigments and the craft traditions that used them, with an emphasis on the Middle Ages.

Ali compiles recipes from as far back as the 3rd century B.C.E. to as recently as the last couple of decades, reproducing a wide range of scientific and artistic illustrations of a wide range of specimens from manuscripts and encyclopedic volumes. Published by Princeton University Press, Gold from Newton’s Apple Tree takes its title from an ink recipe made from using bark extracted from a descendant of Sir Isaac Newton’s apple tree, in which the brown ingredients transform into a rich yellow-gold.

The book is slated for release in April, and you can pre-order your copy in the Colossal Shop. You might also enjoy The Mushroom Color Atlas.

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