In 1972, a diver off the coast of southern Italy saw a hand sticking out of the sand on the seabed and thought he had found a dead body. Then he started brushing the sand away, and this face looked back at him... He's known as Statue A, one of the two Riace Bronzes, and he was cast by a Greek sculptor around 2,500 years ago. He spent most of that time lying under water, and when they finally lifted him out, the face had survived almost untouched. The sculptor built this face out of different materials, piece by piece: the whites of his eyes are carved from calcite, the pupils were made of glass paste, and the tiny tear ducts in the corners of his eyes are a pinkish stone. His lips and even his eyelashes are copper, warmer in tone than the bronze around them, so they read as flesh. And his mouth is slightly open. Look inside and you'll see his teeth, made from a single thin strip of silver. He and his companion are among the very few full-size Greek bronzes to survive at all, since almost all the others were melted down for their metal long ago. The sea that swallowed them is the only reason we can still look into their eyes today...

This is not a photograph, and it's not an oil painting. It might be the most unbelievable watercolor ever made... It's called Sommarnöje, which means something like Summer Delight, and Anders Zorn painted it in 1886. Look at the water, the gentle ripples, the reflections, the wet sheen of it, and then look at the two people, the fine detail of the wooden rowboat, the woman's white dress, the light on her face. It has the near-photographic realism of an oil painting, and it was done in watercolor, a medium so unforgiving that a single wrong stroke ruins the entire piece. Zorn painted this in the first summer of his marriage: the woman in white waiting on the pier is his new wife, Emma, whom he had married only months before. They had just come back from their honeymoon and were staying with her family at Dalarö near Stockholm, still looking for the home where they would spend their life. The man rowing toward her is their friend Carl Gustav Dahlström. It is a real moment from the happiest season of a young couple's life, caught and held forever. In 2010 this single sheet of watercolor sold for twenty-six million Swedish kronor, over three million dollars, the highest price ever paid for a Swedish painting. In his own lifetime, Zorn was celebrated above all for two things: his handling of light, and his ability to paint water. Sommarnöje is where you see exactly why...