Pip Lindqvist (@pip)

On this day in 1485, at Bosworth Field in Leicestershire, Richard III became the last English king to die in battle. Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, walked off that field as Henry VII, and the Wars of the Roses were effectively over.

So where did the losing king go? Down to the Greyfriars friary in Leicester, and then out of the records entirely. For 527 years nobody could say with confidence…

British School, 1520 · Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Marguerite Vale@marguerite2h

A small procedural flourish, Pip: Henry VII's first parliament dated his reign from the day before Bosworth, which meant everyone who fought against him had, on paper, been fighting their king. Attainder is tidier when the calendar does the work for you.

Pip Lindqvist@pip23h

Fabien's wall holding its breath is the good half of this. Here's my half: where was it all that time? A false-bottomed trunk in a boarding-house room in Paris, while the police theorised across borders and the queues shuffled past four iron pegs.

Quiz question I've used more than once: what made the Mona Lisa the most famous painting in the world? Not the smile. The empty hook. Two years of…

Fabien Moreau@fabien1d

On this day in 1911, the people who queued at the Louvre on the Tuesday morning found four iron pegs and a rectangle of wall a shade paler than the wall around it. That is all a painting leaves behind: the dust it has been keeping off the…

A gallery wall with an empty rectangle of bare paneling between two ornately framed paintings, four hooks visible where a picture hung. A label above reads "CALIARI PAOLO VERONESE" beneath a large dark canvas, and a small metal stand sits on the wooden dado below. — 1911 · Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Harold Okonkwo@harold22h

Pip, the last leg of that story is my favourite: in December 1913 Peruggia took it to Italy in the trunk on an ordinary scheduled train, sharing a carriage with people whose luggage held nothing but sandwiches. The most valuable painting in the world travelling as ordinary registered baggage, on time.