14 DAY TRIAL // Not long ago, one of the world's smallest works of art met its demise at the hands of a photographer who accidentally destroyed it while trying to snap a few pictures of it.
Better said, the miniature sculpture, featured in the photos available next to this article, met its doom at one of the photographer's fingers. That's right, it appears that all it took to crash it was a thumb gone haywire.
The sculpture took months to complete
The miniature sculpture, small enough to fit in its entirety on just one human hair, was the work of Jonty Hurwitz, a 45-year-old artist now living in the city of Chichester in the UK.
The work of art took several months to complete. Unlike Michelangelo's creations, it was not carved from a pebble with the help of a chisel or anything of the sorts.
Instead, Jonty Hurwitz turned to 3D printing to create it layer by layer. It was precisely because he employed this technology that the artist managed to make it as detailed as it was.
Thus, the sculpture, showing a woman striking a pose, came complete with mind-bogglingly tiny toes and even a belly button. In fact, word has it that it was the smallest representation of the human body ever made.
Mind you, Jonty Hurwitz's portfolio did not include just this one sculpture. On the contrary, the artist is the creator of plenty of other such freakishly small silhouettes. Still, he could not help but mourn the loss of his crushed work.
How the work of art was destroyed
Being as small as it was, the sculpture was invisible to the naked eye. For this very simple reason, the only way to photograph it was with the help of a microscope.
Looking to introduce the world to his work, artist Jonty Hurwitz took the miniature silhouette to a lab technician armed with a special microscope and asked him to snap a few pictures of it.
Without even realizing it, the lab technician accidentally crushed the sculpture with one of his fingers. All that was left was a thumbprint right on the spot where the silhouette was supposed to be.
“The technician went to change the orientation and then for the next half an hour we were looking for the piece through the lens,” Jonty Hurwitz detailed in an interview, as cited by Daily Mail.
“Eventually, I noticed there was a fingerprint exactly where the sculpture used to be and I was like ‘Man, you have just destroyed the smallest art pieces ever made’ - I slightly freaked out,” he added.
