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Gothic boxwood miniatures are very small Christian-themed wood sculptures produced during the 15th and 16th centuries in the Low Countries, at the end of the Gothic period and during the emerging Northern Renaissance. They consist of highly intricate layers of reliefs made from fine-grained boxwood, often rendered to a nearly microscopic level. Of the approximately 150 surviving examples, the majority are statuettes, skulls, coffins, or spherical beads known as prayer nuts; some 20 are in the form of polyptychs, including triptych and diptych altarpieces, tabernacles, and monstrances. They typically contain imagery from the life of Mary, the crucifixion of Jesus, or vistas of Heaven and Hell. Each miniature required exceptional craftsmanship and may have taken decades to complete. Important collections are in the Art Gallery of Ontario, the British Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. (Full article...)

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In the news

Paralympics opening ceremony

The Summer Paralympics open (ceremony pictured) in Paris, France.
More than two hundred people are killed in an Islamist militant attack in Barsalogho Department, Burkina Faso.
The Islamic State claims responsibility for a mass stabbing that killed three people at a festival in Solingen, Germany.
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On this day

September 1

Illuminated Guru Granth Sahib folio

1145 – The main altar of Lund Cathedral, then the Catholic cathedral of all the Nordic countries, was dedicated to Saint Lawrence and the Virgin Mary.
1604 – The Guru Granth Sahib (folio depicted), the religious text of Sikhism, was installed in the Golden Temple in Amritsar.
1859 – A powerful solar flare caused a coronal mass ejection that struck Earth a few hours later, generating the most intense geomagnetic storm ever recorded and causing bright aurorae visible in the middle latitudes.
1911 – Construction began on the Saline Valley salt tram, which during its operation was the steepest tram in the United States.
1972 – In a match widely publicized as a Cold War confrontation, American chess grandmaster Bobby Fischer became the 11th World Chess Champion with his victory over Soviet Boris Spassky.

Yasuo Kuniyoshi (b. 1889)
Alan Dershowitz (b. 1938)
Doreen Valiente (d. 1999)
Jang Jin-young (d. 2009)

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Today's featured picture

Webb's First Deep Field is the first operational image taken by the James Webb Space Telescope, captured by the telescope's Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) and revealed to the public by NASA in July 2022. The deep-field photograph, which covers a tiny area of sky visible from the Southern Hemisphere, is centered on SMACS 0723, a galaxy cluster in the constellation of Volans. Thousands of galaxies are visible in the image, some as old as 13 billion years and when it was released it became the highest-resolution image of the early universe ever taken.

Photograph credit: NASA

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