The Most Technically Impossible Sculpture Ever Made

In 1753, a sculptor nobody had heard of carved a marble shroud so thin and so precise that people refused to believe it was stone. For over a century the rumor spread across Europe that the veil had been made through alchemy — that an occult prince obsessed with the supernatural had discovered a way to turn real fabric into marble. The rumor was almost certainly invented by the man who commissioned it, because he was exactly the kind of person who wanted the world to believe he was capable of something like that. In this video we explore the technical impossibility of the Veiled Christ, the story of the occult prince who built a chapel full of Masonic symbols and kept two figures with their full circulatory systems exposed in the basement directly beneath it, and why a sculptor nobody has heard of produced what Antonio Canova — one of the greatest sculptors who ever lived — said he would give ten years of his life to have made. Because this isn't just a sculpture. It is the most technically impossible thing a human being has ever done with a single block of marble. And nobody has fully explained how he did it.