Once You See It, You’ll Never Unsee It: 10 Hidden Pictures and TextsHistory Re-Written: 10 Palimpsests and Pentimenti you didn’t know existed

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A palimpsest is a manuscript that preserves traces of an earlier writing that was deliberately erased to make room for a new one. The origin of the term palimpsest can be traced to the Greek pálin, which means again, and psân, which is equivalent to erase. This technique became popular from the 7th century onwards due to the scarcity of Egyptian papyrus. Its use would continue for another five centuries until paper started to be mass-produced.

In recent years, new technologies have managed to recover and reveal to the world a multitude of manuscripts that were considered to be lost. This is not only true of writing; in painting, the examples of artworks veiling a previous version or even a totally different painting are striking, although common. The name of this practice is also evocative: pentimenti (from Italian pentire, to repent). In this article, we will walk you through some of the most incredible palimpsest and pentimenti discoveries that will surely leave you speechless.

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One of the most famous palimpsests is the Archimedes Palimpsest, a codex containing copies in Greek of various writings by Archimedes, the eminent mathematician, physicist, and engineer of Syracuse. In 1229, a Christian monk named Johannes Myronas scraped and washed the folios of the manuscript and then wrote liturgical texts like psalms and prayers on them. Fortunately, the wiping out was not complete and Archimedes' work was rescued just two decades ago, thanks to an elaborate scientific recovery process. The codex was found in the convent of the Holy Sepulcher in Constantinople —present-day Istanbul— and nowadays is kept at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland.

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The master of modernism, Pablo Picasso, once said: "There is only one way to see things until someone shows us how to see them with different eyes". In 2014, a group of researchers and art historians from the Phillips Collection, Cornell University, the National Gallery of Art, and the Winterthur Museum made a startling discovery. Beneath The Blue Room, one of Picasso’s most famous artworks lay a mysterious hidden painting. Restorers had suspected its existence for decades, but the technology to detect it was not sufficient until recently.

The reuse of canvases was a common practice for Picasso at the beginning of his career. This discovery revealed a great deal about the artist's early blue period work and is an excellent example of pentimenti.

Credit: Codex Ephraemi, manuscript of the Greek Bible, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus is an overwritten document that preserves a large part of the Christian Greek Scriptures. The original text, dating from the 5th century, was erased in the 12th century to overwrite the Greek translation of 38 sermons by the Syrian scholar Ephrem. In the early 1840s, a brilliant German linguist named Konstantin von Tischendorf succeeded in deciphering the codex after two years of intense study. It is not known for certain where the original text was written, although Tischendorf believed it came from Egypt.

This discovery is invaluable because it is one of the oldest surviving copies of this section of the Bible and is therefore among the most reliable sources for demonstrating biblical accuracy. The codex is now preserved in the National Library of France.

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In the 1870s the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge received a donation of Dutch landscape paintings. Among these works of art was a beach scene painted by Hendrick van Anthonissen in the 17th century. For more than 150 years the painting showing a number of people gathered at the beach seemed unremarkable. One day, a postgraduate student at the Hamilton Kerr Institute dedicated to the conservation and restoration of the painting discovered a secret underneath. After multiple analyses, he found the figure of a whale beached on the shore.

A conservator's job is always to respect the artist's intentions. However, in this case, it was discovered that van Anthonissen did not remove the whale himself. So in the end, they decided to uncover the original painting underneath in order to return the original image to the public.

Credit: Prateek Katyal

St. Catherine’s Monastery, standing at the foot of Mount Sinai, has one of the world’s largest number of palimpsests. In fact, the monastery’s library holds an exceptional collection of more than 160 reused texts from the 4th to the 12th century. Since 2011, the Sinai Palimpsests Project has been using state-of-the-art spectral imaging to recover erased texts from palimpsest manuscripts found in St. Catherine’s Monastery and has made some incredible discoveries.

Their findings include the Sinaitic Palimpsest, a late 4th-century manuscript of 358 pages containing a translation of the four canonical gospels of the New Testament into Syriac, which has been overwritten by a biography of saints and martyrs in 778 C.E. This palimpsest is considered the oldest copy of the Gospels in Syriac.

Credit: Sandro Botticelli, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

In 2022, Man of Sorrows, a masterpiece by the celebrated Renaissance artist Sandro Botticelli, was auctioned at Sotheby's in New York. The painting, however, concealed a secret. An infrared study revealed elements of a partial and unrelated underdrawing, confirming that the panel was originally prepared for a completely different painting. Although difficult to make out in an upright position, when rotating the image the outlines of what appear to be the early stages of the figures of the Virgin and Child become more visible. The figures can be seen near the top edge of the composition and seem to be stuck cheek to cheek in an endearing pose.

Credit: Prateek Katyal

Discovered in 2000, the Novgorod Codex is still being studied by experts, who continue to uncover new layers of hidden texts, accumulated over decades. In fact, due to the number of layers, the Novgorod is considered a hyper-palimpsest. The codex consists of three wooden boards containing four pages of wax on which the author, or authors, inscribed hundreds of texts over three decades, each time erasing the preceding text and writing over it again.

The original manuscript includes psalms written in Old ecclesiastical Slavonic, a language developed by Byzantine missionaries in the 9th century, the first Slavic dialect of a literary nature. Carbon dating established they were created at the end of the 10th century. The Novgorod Codex was discovered on July 13, 2000, in the excavations of the ancient Russian city of Novgorod, whose archaeological mission began in 1932.

Credit: Paul Cézanne, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

It was recently discovered that underneath French Post-Impressionist Paul Cézanne's Still Life with Bread and Eggs was an earlier creation. The investigation began when the Cincinnati Art Museum's chief curator was examining the piece for possible treatment and cleaning and suddenly noticed some cracks. After X-raying it, she discovered a "well-defined" portrait below the known painting.

There are many theories that can explain why Cézanne decided to repaint the canvas. One of them is that the author, who in 1865 was only 20 years old and did not have many economic resources, reused an already painted base. Another possibility is that it was an artistic experiment that went wrong. Since many of Cézanne’s paintings have disappeared, this discovery allows us to get to know the artist’s process deeply.

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In 2023, thanks to ultraviolet light, scientists from the Austrian Academy of Sciences discovered a "hidden chapter" of a biblical text from more than 1,500 years ago that lay in the Vatican Library. According to experts who analyzed the manuscript, it consists of Christian stories and hymns that could provide key information about how the Bible changed over time. The original text is from the mid-3rd century but was erased in Palestine to be reused.

This discovery provides insight into what the earliest translations of the Bible were like. This text has passages from Matthew 11-12 in the New Testament written in the ancient Syriac language, which gives more details of the current Gospel.

Credit: CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

In the early 1800s, an important palimpsest was found at Bobbio Abbey, an Irish monastery located in the Italian region of Emilia-Romagna. The document, now preserved in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan, is known to contain a Latin text of the Etymologies of St. Isidore of Seville, although it wasn’t completely deciphered until 2020. An international team of researchers from the Sorbonne and New York University discovered that the sheets of parchment had been erased in the 8th century to be reused, destroying a very important astronomical treatise written by Claudius Ptolemy in the 2nd century AD.

The document, which was thought to be lost, contains the oldest known description of the "Meteoroscope", a nine-ringed instrument used to determine the position of celestial bodies. This major discovery sheds new light on the history of astronomy in antiquity and the beginnings of the history of science.

ANCHORED IN SUPERSTITION

10 Strange Nautical Beliefs That Put Old-Timey Sailors On Edge

Credit: Clément Falize

Ahoy, landlubbers! Sailors of yore were a superstitious bunch, believing in omens and all sorts of rituals to keep them safe on the treacherous seas. But who can blame them? It was a dangerous profession to be a sailor in their times.

From bananas to anchor tattoos, here are 10 eerie maritime superstitions that were once part of the unwritten laws of the sea.

Credit: Giorgio Trovato

"Why forbid a good source of fiber and vitamins during a long journey at sea?" you might rightly wonder. While at first glance the taboo doesn’t seem to make much sense, it has been argued that the main reasons were the fruit’s tendency to rot quickly and bring with it all sorts of bugs and critters, particularly the lethal Brazilian wandering spider. Eventually, the real reason got buried beneath the superstition, and the fruit became synonymous with calamity.

Credit: Vidar Nordli-Mathisen

Whistling was forbidden on board as it was believed to summon fierce winds. The superstition likely stemmed from the sound mimicking the howling of a gale, striking fear into sailors' hearts. So, should you ever find yourself at sea, resist the temptation to whistle - lest you be blamed for inviting misfortune onboard!

Credit: Terry Vlisidis

Spilling wine on the deck was seen as a good omen, believed to appease the sea gods and ensure a safe voyage. Similarly, when a ship is launched for the very first time, a bottle of champagne is smashed on the bow to bring her good fortune. Nevertheless, unless you are the captain, refrain from pouring wine on the deck without asking first - or you might end up scrubbing it!

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Tossing a coin overboard before setting sail was thought to appease the gods and guarantee a prosperous journey. This tradition persisted across cultures, from ancient Greece to Viking Scandinavia. On the contrary, dropping a stone from a departing vessel was considered a bad omen, as it seemingly had the opposite effect, ensuring the ship would never return.

Credit: Chris Barbalis

"Red sky at night, sailors' delight. Red sky at morning, sailors take warning."

This age-old adage served as an ancient way of predicting the weather, with a red sky at night signaling fair weather on the horizon, and a red dawn announcing stormy or treacherous weather. Sailors trusted this rhyme to heart, and according to modern meteorologists, there is an inkling of truth in it. A red sky often means that there is a lot of water vapor in the atmosphere, and since in mid-latitude regions storms tend to move from west to east, the rhyme was an easy mnemotechnic device to broadly estimate weather patterns.

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Although Fridays actually seem like one of the best days of the week to go sailing, this is surprisingly an enduring nautical superstition. Old sailors believed that Fridays were unlucky for embarking on a seafaring journey (especially on the 13th). This superstition likely originated from the Christian belief that Jesus was crucified on a Friday, instilling fear in sailors.

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Sailors adorned themselves with tattoos not only for personal expression but also for protection at sea. Designs like anchors and nautical stars were believed to ward off evil spirits and ensure a safe return home. These two designs actually served very specific purposes, as an anchor was said to ensure a sailor would not get lost at sea should he fall overboard, and a nautical star allegedly helped sailors find their way home.

Credit: Fer Nando

The sight of an albatross trailing a ship was seen as a symbol of good fortune. Believed to be the souls of dead sailors, the birds were revered among seafaring adventurers, and killing one was said to bring great misfortune upon a ship. This superstition was likely popularized by Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," which warned sailors against harming these majestic birds.

Credit: Kalen Emsley

Historically, women were considered bad luck on ships, believed to anger the sea gods and stir up tempests. During the Age of Sail, women who wanted to heed the call of the sea were forced to disguise themselves as men, but in spite of the difficulties some even became feared pirates, like Mary Read and Anne Bonny, who sailed under the command of the infamous Captain Jack Rackham. This misogynistic superstition persisted for centuries, despite the invaluable contributions of female sailors to the art of sailing.

Credit: Kevin Keith

To this day, when passing the equator, sailors often engage in all sorts of rituals and celebrations in the name of King Neptune. This quirky tradition actually goes back almost 400 years, beginning in the British Navy, and becoming popular even in civilian or scientific crews. The ancient ritual is said to ensure safe passage into the Southern Hemisphere, and even Charles Darwin witnessed it during his voyages!