Arts & Culture

The mystery of the missing pixels

Sy Boles

Harvard Staff Writer

October 30, 2025

1 min read

Take our quiz to test your knowledge of Harvard Art Museums’ eeriest works

Lurking in the galleries and archives of the Harvard Art Museums you’ll find works that inspire, delight, and, sometimes, unnerve. The following quiz shines a light on the darker corners of these hallowed halls.

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1. We’ve hidden a portion of this 16th-century German print featuring a sleeping baby and three skulls. What’s the missing piece?

An hourglass

A bottle of wine

A sickle

2. Albrecht Dürer’s “Knight, Death, and the Devil” certainly contains all three of those characters, but what other figure in the print, obscured here, has been interpreted by some scholars as representing evil?

A cat

A snake

A lizard

3. As a witch casts a spell at her table in this 18th-century print, what creature sits to her left?

A mummy

A demon

A vampire

4. What mythical creature is samurai Minamoto no Yorimitsu battling in this Japanese triptych?

A human-faced dog

A water sprite

An Earth Spider

5. This Francisco Goya print — “El Sueño de la Razón Produce Monstruos” — is seen as
promoting the values of which intellectual movement?

Enlightenment

Existentialism

Romanticism

6. What event is thought to have inspired this painting of Death as an animated corpse strangling
a tiger amid the bodies of other exotic animals in the wilderness?

A tiger escaped from a traveling circus

A tuberculosis epidemic

The death of P.T. Barnum’s prize elephant

7. What old-timey special effect is at work in these side-by-side images of a spirit lurking behind lovers?

Stereoscope

The Sabattier Effect

Masking

8. In the 1922 print “Industrial Devil,” what is hidden beneath the creature's feet?

Crosses

Candles

Smokestacks

9. What is the girl dressed in a princess costume holding?

A skull

A doll

A mask

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