20 Hidden Details Secretly Tucked Into Famous Historical Objects

Michelangelo Buonarroti created The Creation of Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, Vatican City, circa 1511, at the behest of Pope Julius II. In 1990, a doctor named Frank Meshberger published an article in a medical journal in which he pointed out how the red robe and angels surrounding God actually resemble an anatomically accurate view of the human brain in cross-section, with the cerebrum and brainstem clearly defined. There’s no note left behind explaining what Michelangelo intended, but the anatomy is quite close.

Augustus Saint-Gaudens was a sculptor who designed the Double Eagle, a $20 gold coin. The Philadelphia Mint struck hundreds of thousands of them in 1933, but President Franklin D. Roosevelt quickly signed an order that ended the domestic gold standard and directed the Mint to melt down the batch, so none were supposed to make it out legally. A cashier stole a few from the pile, and the Secret Service treated the surviving coins as stolen government property, though one was later legally monetized and sold at auction decades later for nearly $18.9 million.

Hidden from sight beneath the robes at the foot of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor is a broken shackle and severed chain. Édouard René de Laboulaye, a French abolitionist, suggested the statue in 1865, and sculptor Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi constructed it to commemorate the Union’s victory in the Civil War and the end of slavery, dedicating it in 1886. The concept of Liberty as an immigrant welcome developed afterward, when poet Emma Lazarus’s poem was installed on the pedestal in 1903.

In 1901, a group of Greek sponge divers plucked a bronze lump from a Roman-era shipwreck near the tiny island of Antikythera in the Mediterranean Sea. It looked more like trash than anything useful until a museum director named Valerios Stais saw gear teeth inside it. The object, which dates to around 150 to 100 BCE, was eventually subjected to X-rays and CT scans, revealing no less than 30 interlocking gears. Together, they formed the Antikythera Mechanism, a hand-cranked analog computer capable of tracking the movements of the sun and the moon, predicting solar and lunar eclipses, and calculating the four-year cycle of the Olympics.

As Stone Engraver Ernest C. Bairstow was carving Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address into the Indiana limestone walls inside the Lincoln Memorial, built in Washington, D.C., from 1914 to 1922, he reached for an “E” stencil instead of an “F” and carved “EUTURE.” Workers chiseled off the bottom bar of the E and slotted in a sliver of limestone to turn it into an F. The patch is still visible today, slightly discolored from the surrounding stone.

King Lycurgus of Thrace is ensnared by grapevines for attacking the god Dionysus in a Roman glass cup that dates to the 4th century CE, and which currently resides in the British Museum. This Lycurgus Cup appears a jade green in daylight, but becomes ruby red when the light comes from within. When analyzed using electron microscopy in 1990, researchers discovered the glass was filled with gold and silver particles. These tiny, 70-nanometer-wide particles were small enough to refract light differently, depending on its direction.

The United States issued its first airmail stamp in 1918 showing a Curtiss JN-4 “Jenny” biplane, printed in two separate ink passes. One sheet was mistakenly inserted upside down during the second pass. This flipped the image of the plane. The sheet was bought by collector William T. Robey for $24 at a Washington, D.C. post office counter. A single remaining “Inverted Jenny” can sell for over $1.7 million at auction.

The Parthenon, built in Athens from 447 to 432 BCE under architects Iktinos and Kallikrates, looks perfectly straight from a distance, but laser scans reveal there isn’t one straight line in the whole building. The floor rises 2.4 inches at its center, and the outer columns swell and tilt inward about 2.8 inches. The Parthenon’s builders calculated these curves to counteract the optical illusions caused by looking at large architectural objects from afar, because a long straight horizontal line appears to sag in the middle, and straight vertical columns seem to bow outward.

In 1939, archaeologist Basil Brown uncovered the Sutton Hoo helmet from a ship burial in Suffolk, England, thought to be that of King Rædwald of East Anglia, who died circa 625 CE. Seen from the front, it resembles a human face with two hollow eye sockets, a nose and a mustache. However, researchers at the British Museum have discovered that the silver-gilt eyebrows actually constitute a dragon’s wings, the bronze nose is its body, and the mustache its tail. It all joins up with a second dragon that has been carved into the crest on top of the helmet.

The stone for the Washington Monument’s base was quarried in Maryland. Construction started in 1848 under architect Robert Mills. Funding dried up after a few years, and then the Civil War put the project into a holding pattern, leaving it unfinished for over two decades. When construction was eventually restarted by engineer Thomas Lincoln Casey, other marble was used for the monument’s upper section. The mismatched stone still shows as a visible color seam partway up the tower.

Leonardo da Vinci painted The Last Supper on a refectory wall in Milan from 1495 to 1498. Next to the arm of Judas Iscariot, the disciple who betrayed Jesus, is a spilled salt cellar, a Renaissance symbol of ill fortune and betrayal. Because of Leonardo’s experimental paint technique, the painting suffered rapid deterioration, and the detail is almost impossible to see on the wall now. However, it is quite visible in an early pupil’s copy, made circa 1515.

In 1753, after being recast in Philadelphia by metal founders John Pass and John Stow, the Liberty Bell read “Province of PENSYLVANIA” and contained a single N. Many people assume it was a mistake in the casting process, but it was a common spelling of the word at the time. Colony founder William Penn had actually used that spelling in his 1681 colonial charter, decades before the bell was even made.

The Bayeux Tapestry, made on 230 feet of linen in the 1070s, shows the Norman conquest of England, including the bitter rivalry between Harold II and William the Conqueror. In one panel, some courtiers point at a star with a fiery tail, which is identified in the accompanying Latin text as a star that they marveled at. It was actually Halley’s Comet, which was visible in the sky in April 1066. Harold saw it as a bad omen. William treated it as a blessing before the Battle of Hastings in October.

The Rosetta Stone was created in 196 BCE and was discovered by French troops in 1799 close to the Egyptian city of Rosetta. It features the same edict from King Ptolemy V in three versions, written in Egyptian hieroglyphics, in the everyday language Demotic, and in ancient Greek, the language of the Egyptian court at the time. Because scholars could already read Greek, French linguist Jean-François Champollion used that version to finally crack the hieroglyphs in 1822.

Codex Gigas, which is the biggest surviving illuminated manuscript from the Middle Ages, was produced at a Benedictine monastery in Bohemia about 1200. A full-page portrait of a green, clawed devil adorns one page, while the page prior has a full-page painting of the Heavenly City, a deliberate pairing of damnation and salvation. The story goes that a monk facing execution wrote the whole book in a single night with the devil’s help, though handwriting evidence suggests that one man worked on the volume for decades.

When the Persian king Cyrus the Great toppled Babylon’s last monarch, Nabonidus, in 539 BCE, he placed a barrel-shaped clay cylinder, the Cyrus Cylinder, inscribed with cuneiform script, in a foundation deposit under the walls of the city, as was a Babylonian building practice. The text contains Cyrus’s proclamation that the people who were sent into exile could go back home, and that the statues of the gods taken by previous rulers would be returned, according to a decree that justified his rule over the city.

The Alfred Jewel, found in Somerset, England, in 1693 and now in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford University, is composed of gold, enamel and rock crystal. The rim bears the inscription “Alfred ordered me to be made.” There is a socket at the bottom of the object where a wooden or ivory rod would have been attached. King Alfred the Great of Wessex had jewels like it made to serve as handles for an æstel, a pointer used for following text, which he sent to bishops along with his Old English translations of religious texts to help encourage literacy.

When Grand Central Terminal in New York City opened in 1913, its turquoise ceiling was adorned with gold-leaf constellations, painted by the artist Charles Basing. The stars were all backward, with east and west having been reversed. Representatives of the Vanderbilt family, who bankrolled the station, insisted that the image represented what God would see looking down at us from outside the celestial sphere. But historians believe that Basing probably did no such thing, having merely traced the image from a flat drawing on the floor beneath the ceiling, and then accidentally mirrored it.

Michelangelo carved David out of one piece of Carrara marble in Florence from 1501 to 1504. It is 17 feet tall and can be found at the Galleria dell’Accademia. At eye level, David’s head and right hand look disproportionately large. According to the records of Florence Cathedral’s building office, the sculpture was originally planned to stand at the top of a buttress, high above street level. Michelangelo knew that from below, the statue’s proportions would appear harmonious, and thus deliberately made David’s head and hand larger.

Gustave Eiffel, the engineer who had constructed the Eiffel Tower for the 1889 World’s Fair in Paris, built himself a suite near the top of the tower, nearly 1,000 feet above the city. He carpeted and papered the apartment, furnished it with armchairs and a piano. It served as his day office, as a laboratory to monitor weather conditions, and as a salon for distinguished guests, and in 1889, it hosted the inventor Thomas Edison. The scientific equipment he kept there was one of the reasons that the tower was allowed to remain standing past its scheduled destruction in 1909.

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