WEEKLY Dose of Art

It's been a while.

We missed you, and honestly, the art world kept moving without us saying a word about it. So let's catch up.

Because what's been happening is too good to ignore.

A French researcher was chatting with colleagues.

Someone joked: "Hey, you should check if there's a palimpsest hiding in Blois."

He laughed. Then he Googled it.

Then he found a piece of history that had been missing for decades.

The World's Most Valuable "Recycled" Manuscript

Let's go back to 250 BC.

Archimedes of Syracuse is alive. He's calculating pi, inventing the principles of buoyancy, laying the groundwork for calculus, geometry, and fundamental physics. Centuries before calculus was cool.

He dies, legend says, at the hands of a Roman soldier, while drawing math diagrams in the sand. Wouldn't stop. The soldier got impatient.

His writings survived. Barely.

Artist spotlight of the week

The Joke That Changed Everything

Victor Gysembergh is a researcher at France's CNRS (National Center for Scientific Research). He's obsessed with palimpsests, ancient manuscripts where text has been scraped off and written over.

He searches for them for fun. Literally just Googles city names + "palimpseste" in his spare time.

He Googled "palimpseste Blois."

He found something.

The Musée des Beaux-Arts in Blois, a fine arts museum in central France, not exactly famous for ancient mathematics, had a mystery item in its collection. A single parchment page.

Gysembergh compared it against Heiberg's 1906 photographs, now preserved in Copenhagen at the Royal Danish Library.

Match!!

What's Actually On It

One side of the page: Archimedes' treatise On the Sphere and the Cylinder, Book I, Propositions 39 to 41. Geometric diagrams still largely readable, despite being 1,000+ years old.

The other side? Covered by an illustration of the Prophet Daniel flanked by two lions.

Added in the 20th century.

Probably, scholars suspect that to increase the page's market value. Someone painted over ancient Greek math to make it look like decorative religious art. So they could sell it.

It worked. The page ended up in Blois.

And Archimedes' text beneath it? Still unread. Still hidden.

The Hunt Is Not Over

Two more pages are still missing.

And the one side of this page is covered by Daniel's illustration? Scientists can't read it yet with conventional methods. But they're planning to.

Gysembergh is preparing an imaging campaign using multispectral photography and synchrotron-based X-ray fluorescence, the same technology that revealed hidden texts in ancient manuscripts around the world. 

These tools can see through paint without damaging the parchment.

It could take up to a year to get the necessary authorizations and equipment in place.

But when they do?

We might read words written by Archimedes that no human has seen in over a thousand years.

All because someone made a joke about Blois.

This Week in Art