Paintings

Some images become permanently etched into humanity's collective memory. A sinuous figure on a bridge, a sky burning in shades of blood and fire, two distant silhouettes walking on with indifference, and a central figure clutching its head with wide, hollow eyes. Almost anyone in the world instantly recognizes Edvard Munch's The Scream.

The day was gray and heavy, as if even the sky mourned what was about to happen. Lady Jane Grey, a young woman of barely seventeen who had been proclaimed Queen of England for a brief and turbulent nine days, sat alone in a small stone cell in the Tower of London. Her slender, fragile figure was wrapped in a simple white dress, a symbol of purity that contrasted sharply with the darkness of the walls around her.

Some paintings are simply looked at. Others are wandered through. And then there's The Garden of Earthly Delights, by Hieronymus Bosch, a work so dense with details, creatures, and symbols that not even five hundred years of study have managed to fully agree on what it actually means.

Some stories begin with a woman. Not with a war, a king, or a monster. With a woman. In Greek mythology, that woman was called Pandora. And her story is far stranger — and considerably darker — than the popular version of the curious young woman who opened a box and let all the evils of the world escape.