Missing Pieces

Madonna of the Meadow (Madonna with the Christ Child and Saint John the Baptist), by Raphael, 1506. Art Library/Alamy Stock Photo.

The Lost Years of Jesus

Did Jesus have a difficult childhood? Was his youth spent in Egypt or England, India or Japan? The four canonical gospels are quiet on his early life, leading some to speculate.

A mugshot of the Collegno amensiac at the heart of the Bruneri-Canella Case.

The Bruneri-Canella Case

The curious case of an apparent amnesiac in Collegno paved the way for forensic science to become one of the pillars of Italian law.

Percy Fawcett on an expedition in South America, c.1910.

The Lost City

First Tenochtitlán, then Cuzco, then Machu Picchu – why shouldn’t more cities paved with gold be discovered in South America?

Fred Ott’s Sneeze, an early kinetoscopic film produced by the Edison Manufacturing Company, 1894.

Lost Movies

Almost three quarters of the golden age of Hollywood has been lost. Preservation only began when film came to be seen as art.

The Venus de Milo at the Louvre Museum, Paris, 1964. Photo © Gamma-Keystone, France via Getty Images.

Armless Fun?

In 1820 the discovery of an ancient Greek statue with missing arms posed more questions than answers.

Yonker Ramp and His Sweetheart, by Frans Hals, 1623

No Laughing Matter

Aristotle’s lost treatise on laughter is a serious business. Could laughter lead to the downfall of society?

23 Großer Hirschgraben, birthplace of Goethe, after the Second World War.

Going, going…Goethe?

The question of reconstruction was a thorny issue in postwar Germany, where celebrations of the ‘glorious’ past took on a different hue.