Imagine carving a single block of marble until the veil becomes so thin that the stone itself turns transparent.

Antonio Canova, one of the greatest sculptors who ever lived, saw this statue and said he would have given 10 years of his life to have made it...

It is called the Veiled Christ, and it has been called the most beautiful sculpture in the world. It sits in the Cappella Sansevero in Naples, a single block of marble carved in 1753 into the body of the dead Christ, lying beneath a shroud so thin and so perfectly rendered that, beneath it, you can see the swelling of the veins, the hollow of the closed eyes and the wound in the side.

Prince Raimondo di Sangro had first hired a famous sculptor, Antonio Corradini, to carve it. Corradini died with nothing finished but a small terracotta sketch. The prince then handed the commission to a young and almost unknown Neapolitan named Giuseppe Sanmartino, and what Sanmartino produced was so far beyond what anyone expected that people refused to believe it was carved at all...

The veil, they said, could not be marble. It had to be a real cloth that the prince, a notorious alchemist, had somehow turned to stone with a secret chemical process. The legend has never fully died, and Raimondo di Sangro did everything to deserve it. He was the head of the Neapolitan Masonic lodge, a polyglot who read Arabic and Hebrew, an inventor who built an "eternal flame" from chemicals of his own making.

In the crypt beneath the chapel he kept two of his strangest creations: the "anatomical machines," two full human skeletons wrapped in astonishingly detailed reproductions of the entire human circulatory system, every artery and vein. For two centuries people believed he had somehow petrified the bodies of two living servants. Modern study has shown the skeletons are real, but the vascular systems were made by human hands.

There is one more legend: it is said that when the Veiled Christ was finished, the prince had Sanmartino blinded, so that he could never create anything so beautiful again.

It is almost certainly not true. But people have repeated it for two hundred and fifty years, because they needed an explanation for how a thing like this could exist, and be made only once, by a man almost no one had heard of, and never be equalled by anyone since...

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