Every Physically Impossible Art Ever Made

You love all types of art. I love all types of art. So, let us begin with a Roman cup, the Lycurgus Cup. The year is somewhere between the late 200s and the early 400s AD, as the Romans are drinking out of a beautiful cup, a stunning piece of work. However, it should be physically impossible for them to have created because, when you shine a light in front of this cup, it's jade green. But shine that same light from behind it and that green becomes a glowing blood red and nobody knows where it came from. There was no dig site or find spot and no discovery story. It simply appears in the written record in 1845, in the hands of a French collector, before the British Museum bought it. Who else? In 1958, where it still sits today. One popular thought is that the color change mimics red grapes ripening into wine, which would make it perfect for a feast. And we all know how the Romans enjoyed their feasts. So, how does this cup actually change color and what makes it so impossible? Well, the cup contains microscopic amounts of gold and silver fused together in single alloy particles only around 70 nanometers across. That's about a tenth of the wavelength of visible light, which is small enough to trigger an effect known as plasmon resonance. Basically, the silver in those particles scatters light straight back at you and that scattered light lands in the green, which is why it's jade from the front. But shine a light through it from behind and the gold swallows the green and yellow entirely. So the only thing that survives the journey out the other side is red. What makes this impossible is it took until 1990, over 1500 years after it was made, before two scientists finally worked out how it does what it does, thanks to a transmission electron microscope. In fact, experts believe the Romans stumbled onto this by accident, probably from throwing metal working waste into their glass. But here's the part that gets me. By the 300s AD, they were following a recipe for it. They just had no idea why it worked. And most of the time, it actually didn't. And no, this isn't how mood rings work. Now, imagine that halfway through the creation of the Lycurgus cup, the artist quit, or died, or both. Then another artist picks it up, continues to work on it only for them to quit as well. Then, all of a sudden, you are tasked with completing it. Daunting, right? Well, that's exactly what happened to Michelangelo's David. Yes, because, around 1464, a block of marble was quarried at Carrara to be used in the creation of a series of prophets destined for the roofline of the Florence Cathedral. Sculptor Agostino di Duccio began working on it, carved out its legs and torso and then quit. A decade later, Antonio Rossellino was given the job and he didn't even start. Then what would be nicknamed Il Gigante sat for roughly 35 years outside in the cathedral work yard, taking on the brunt of nature. Then arrived Michelangelo. Presented with a half-finished artwork, designed for something completely different, Michelangelo got to work at 26 years old in 1501, sculpting David in a position unlike anyone else had before him, depicting the biblical figure before his fight with Goliath, not after. However, two issues in the marble made this historical sculpture initially hopeless. Firstly, the marble was of poor quality and, secondly, but most importantly, you can't add stone back or paint over mistakes. Marble had already been taken out by Agostino and Antonio and it was originally sculpted with oversized head and hands, as it was supposed to be seen from far below. But this didn't stop Michelangelo from creating what is arguably the most iconic sculpture in history, which was completed in 1504 and the original can be seen in the Galleria dell'Accademia, in Florence, Italy. Yet, David isn't the only seemingly impossible sculpture. Because the Rape of Proserpina, created by Gian Lorenzo Bernini between 1621 and 22, at just 23 years old, is mind-boggling. The marble does things marbles should not do. Pluto, the god of the underworld, is depicted seizing Proserpina, dragging her down to his world, causing her mother, Ceres, the goddess of harvest, to grieve so violently that the Earth stops producing. And because Proserpina has eaten the pomegranate seeds of the underworld, she must return to the underworld year after year after year at the same time, aka winter. As you look closely at the marble, you see the shocking detail of Pluto's hand as it grips Proserpina's thigh, the flesh moving and dimpling around each of Pluto's fingertips. A detail so incredible, making hard stone appear as a soft, comforting pillow that stuns its viewers, such as myself, when I saw it in person. It is truly glorious and it's where you can see the tear up close. Yes, a thin trickle of marbled tears running down Proserpina's cheek, carved to encapsulate light as if she was alive. The hair drapes, flows and suspends itself in air, depicting the two mid-battle rather than before or after conflict, such as David, and as you move around the sculpture, varying stories appear. It also makes what is a tragic, vile assault impossibly appear beautiful. As all art should do, it makes you reflect deeply about the world around you and, in our case, how dark history can be. Speaking of beautiful art, as you lift your sight to the ceiling of the Sant'Ignazio di Loyola. In Rome, you will see painter and perspective theorist Andrea Pozzo's Apotheosis of Saint Ignatius, crafted in the early 1690s. What's impossible about this artwork, other than the location it was painted, was the fact that it only makes sense from a single tile in the church. Stand on the small brass-edged marble disc in the nave and then glance upwards. The whole thing perfectly lines up with the real church, making it appear as if the church itself extends all the way into heaven. Whereas, just two steps forward and all of a sudden, while still awe-inspiring, it makes little sense. And here's the thing that got even me. Yes, I saw this too. The church was supposed to have a dome. it never got one. The money ran out, of course, and there were doubts the walls could even support it. So Pozzo painted one instead, a 17-meter dome on a completely flat surface which, from the floor, you would absolutely swear was real. However, while Andrea's work required a full church ceiling, What carver Chen Juzhang created was, quite literally, the opposite. Crafted from a single, let me repeat that, from a single olive pit, in 1737, Chen carved a small boat that measured just 3.4 centimeters long, 1.4 centimeter wide, and 1.6 centimeter tall, which, for our American audience is super small and inside the boat we find eight figures, each with their own story. But that's not the impossible part at all because, if you flip it over, the full text of Su Shi's Latter Ode on the Red Cliff is inscribed on the underside. All 357 characters of it, which means each character is under a millimeter across, carved into a curved nut with a knife, and you cannot read a single one of them without magnification, which, when you consider that naturally our hands are ever so slightly shaky, no matter your level of health, makes this just mind-exploding. Now, imagine you commissioned a painting, only to months later receive a letter explaining that it will be a year late because its artist is waiting for a flower to bloom. Well, flowers in a terracotta vase, yes, I said vase, not vase, but anyway, flowers in a terracotta vase, painted by Jan van Huysum, isn't impossible in how it was created, rather in what is depicted within the image. Over 30 different species of flowers, from tulips, hyacinths, poppies, roses, ants on the stems and even dewdrops on the petals. You see, all these different types of flowers would never have been in bloom at the same time, which would have allowed Jan to simply prop them in, all in a vase, arrange them to his liking and paint as he would have liked to. Instead, He either worked from sketches he drafted from plant nurseries around Amsterdam, and the two dates on the image suggest he created it in various stages as he waited for flowers to come into season to ensure he properly portrayed them in his masterpiece. Then there's the fact that each individual flower chosen is almost always rare and expensive, specifically arranged as a display of wealth, as much as it was a showcase of beauty. Combined with the dew dripping and the insects crawling, the bouquet appears to be alive, rather than just a moment captured on a canvas. Whereas our next impossible artwork depicts a dead man, Christ, in a marble veil, which made the marble it was created out of not only somehow opaque but appear as a true mask made of silk or something. Christ is shrouded so finely that he's still visible from head to toe. The emotion of his face is readable, for goodness sakes. Even the wounds are visible. Artist Giuseppe San Martino finished this sculpture, in 1753, in the San Severo Chapel in Naples, where it still sits to this day. Now, here is something that you don't realize about marble, and I never knew this for the longest time either. Marble is actually very faintly translucent. Crazy, right? Well, it's this fact which Giuseppe based everything on, planning meticulously the work which crafted its veil last to exploit this because, viewing it in real life, you notice how the marble almost seems alive, catching light the way fabric should, making it really appear as if you were seeing through the marble at Christ's body. And what's even more impossible than the illusion is the fact that, in places, the shroud is separated from Christ. Thin gaps sculpted masterfully by Giuseppe to allow light to pass through. And that's what makes it so amazing. The shroud should make Christ harder to see, but how it's crafted actually makes you look harder, making you more aware of all the details. There's actually a 250 year old story that Raimundo de Sangro made the veil by chemically turning real cloth to marble. It was so strong that the museum has a whole page debunking it. Anyway, after that story, you must, I say you must, look at this. Can you even believe that the fishing net is marble? I I mean, it looks like it was crafted and the net was added as a finishing detail, bought from the docks and added as a cherry. But no, Francesco Chiarolo really sculpted it from marble, he really did, in a piece called Il Disinganno. And here's the kicker, it sits in the same room we were just in, the San Severo Chapel. chapel from the same decade with two impossible objects. Indeed, every knot and strand had to be freed on all sides by cutting away the marble from behind, inside and underneath. And while I don't know a lot about marble other than the works being made with it, that sounds pretty impossible to me because, as Francesco carved, the whole thing would shake and each strand of the net isn't exactly thick. So imagine how devastating it would be if just a single strand, just one single strand, happened to snap halfway through. Even more insane is the polishing. Naples had craftsmen who specialized in burnishing marble. That was their entire job and every single one of them refused to touch the net, terrified of being the man who shattered it in his own hands. So, Chiarolo polished the whole thing himself, alone. Do you hear that, Alex Honnold? But enough about sculptures, because take a look at this. I mean, what is going on here? Painted by the one and only Salvador Dali, in 1954, and currently hanging in the Met in New York and yeah, at first, it's a crucifixion. Christ floating with no nails, no blood, no crown of thorns, but look at the cross. That isn't a cross, it's a tesseract, a four-dimensional unfolded cube. Yeah, so what you do is you just take a normal cube, cut it open, flatten it out and you can lay it down as six squares in the shape of a cross. Now do that to a cube from the fourth dimension and you get 8 cubes in the shape of what Dali painted, which means the object he's depicting cannot exist. Not we can't build it yet. Not nobody's tried. It physically cannot fit in our 3D world. It is physically impossible. There is much to read into Dali's view on Christ and time, but what you're looking at is a shadow of a shape that can't be here, flattened down into something your human eyes can perceive, then flattened again onto a canvas. For something printed a bit more classically, what about Print Gallery, crafted masterfully by M. C. Escher in 1956, and if you follow the subject. A young man who stands in a gallery, staring at a print of a harbor town. Your eyes go all over the place as the image swells and stretches from side to side, before realizing the town in the print contains a building and one of those buildings opens onto the same gallery that the young man is in. This effect, which you've likely seen on those TikToks in Procreate, in which the creator just zooms and zooms and zooms, is known as the Droste effect. But what Escher did was twist it, because as the image repeats, it also twists, and where the center point should be is Escher's signature, as his creation could not go there, as it would be physically impossible for him to continue to shrink his image. However, while Escher's impossible shrinking happened on paper, there's a man in Birmingham doing it for real. Willard Wigan, born 1957, sculpts inside the eye of a needle. And I don't mean small. I mean some of his figures are only three times the size of a human blood cell. The pulse in your fingertip is enough to launch a piece across the room. So Wigan does breathing exercise, slows his heart rate down and carves between the beats. Yes, literally. He also makes his own tools, including tweezers, out of his own eyelashes. The things we do for art. Because whilst placing Alice into a Mad Hatter's tea party inside a needle, he sighed, one breath out, one breath back in, and he inhaled her. Gone. Somewhere in his cavities, as he put it. Months of work, destroyed by a single breath. If that happened to me, it might bend my mind towards the insane in the membrane. However, on that note, in 2014, Jonti Hurwitz, a South African engineer, created perhaps one of the most mind-bending pieces of art we have ever seen, because he They sculpted this woman using multi-photon lithography, essentially lasers being focused through a microscope onto a light-sensitive resin which absorbs two photons, literally two particles of light at a time, and solidifies them in that moment. Basically 3D printing but really, really, really small. and you can't sell it at your local farmer's market. Because Jonti's creation is 80 by 100 by 30 microns, which is a tenth of a millimeter, and tiny enough to literally stand up straight on a human hair. You quite literally cannot see her with your naked eye. Look at the slide and all you see is a blank speck of mirror. And a normal microscope won't save you either because the finest details on her are around 300 nanometers wide, which is the wavelength of visible light itself. Light physically cannot carry that detail. To see her face you need electrons, which is why any image you've ever seen of this sculpture is merely a scan, a reconstruction of it using data. So how do we even know it exists? That's thing we don't. Which is why Hurwitz named this piece Trust. And trust me, if you enjoyed this video, you're going to want to check out this video on each period in history's most disturbing piece of art.