King Tut and the Making of a Modern Obsession

Michelangelo’s Sleeping Cupid was sold as an ancient Roman sculpture. There was just one problem: it wasn’t ancient. In 1496, the young Michelangelo became entangled in a deception involving an art dealer, a powerful cardinal, and the Renaissance obsession with antiquity. He went to Rome and tried to recover his sculpture. He failed—but the affair introduced him to patrons who could change his career, provided he could deliver on their expectations. Before the David and the Sistine Chapel, this lost sculpture helped open doors. This episode follows the Sleeping Cupid scandal, the connections behind Michelangelo’s Bacchus and Pietà, and Isabella d’Este, the collector who eventually wanted the Cupid, knowing exactly who had made it. Explore the story further in the companion Verso Dossier, with a timeline, a guide to the players, sleeping Cupids across the centuries, and rabbit holes into Renaissance forgery and Charles I’s art collection. Available to paid subscribers only on Substack.

Albert Barnes spent decades building an institution that was never supposed to become an ordinary museum. After his death, the collection stayed together—but the Foundation around it changed dramatically. This episode follows the battles over Barnes’s rules, the people who inherited them, and the eventual move from Merion to downtown Philadelphia. It asks a larger question: when we preserve a legacy, are we preserving the objects themselves—or the ideas, systems, and values that gave them meaning in the first place?

In 1914, Hilma af Klint and Wassily Kandinsky showed work in the same building in Malmö. He had five paintings in the grand galleries and a reviewer comparing them to bacteria. She had one conventional landscape in a women's section near the fire exit, and ten enormous abstract canvases she'd finished seven years earlier sitting somewhere else entirely. A century later, that coincidence has turned into a contest: the Swedish mystic who got there first, and the well-connected man who took the credit. But af Klint never used the word abstract, Kandinsky spent years insisting he wasn't ready to abandon the visible world, and nobody in 1912 could agree on what to call any of it. This episode is about what af Klint actually made and who helped her make it, the twenty years she spent trying to find an audience for it, and why the story of a new idea always seems to need one name attached. Featuring séances in Stockholm, a museum that fit inside a suitcase, a conference in London where almost nothing happened, and the question of what we close off when we hand her the title we took from him. Buy Me a Coffee: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://buymeacoffee.com/versopod⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

In 1884, John Singer Sargent unveiled a portrait at the Paris Salon that he was certain would make him the most celebrated painter in France. Instead, a single fallen shoulder strap turned into the scandal of the season, and the room laughed at both the artist and his sitter. The woman in the black dress was Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau, a New Orleans–born Creole beauty who had spent nearly her whole life in Paris and was still described in the papers as American. Sargent was an American too, born in Italy, raised nowhere in particular, and equally desperate to be claimed by a French art world that would never quite claim him. They staked their reputations on the same canvas. Then their paths split. Sargent lost commissions, fled to London, and was back on top within five years. Amélie commissioned portrait after portrait trying to replace the image that had defined her, and watched Paris stop caring. The painting that ruined her made him, and by the time it reached the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1916, her name had been removed from it entirely. This episode covers the Paris Salon of 1884, the professional beauties of the Third Republic, the nineteenth-century debate over cosmetics and artifice, and what happens when two outsiders take the same risk and only one of them is allowed to recover from it.

The Amber Room was an entire chamber made of carved amber, backed in gold, and once called the Eighth Wonder of the World. Prussia built it, gave it to Russia, and the Nazis looted it in 1941. In 1945 it vanished in the ruins of Königsberg and has never been found. For eighty years people have searched mines, lakes, bunkers, and shipwrecks for it. This is the story of what most likely happened to it, the curator who spent his life refusing to accept it, and why a lost treasure is so much easier to live with than a destroyed one.