Some of the world's most famous artworks live behind glass in Tokyo, Paris and Rome. A few of them, in miniature, live on our shelves. Here is a small museum you can hold in one hand, with the stories that made the originals famous.
The jue: a wine vessel older than its name
The jue, with its three pointed legs, long spout and capped pillars, is one of the most recognisable shapes of the Shang dynasty (c. 1600–1046 BCE), used to serve warm wine in ancestral rituals. Oddly, the name came over a thousand years later, from a 2nd-century dictionary. Our miniature jue wears a turquoise verdigris patina over fine taotie-style patterns.
The figure with snow-goggle eyes
The original was made around 1000–400 BC and is now an Important Cultural Property at the Tokyo National Museum. Its name, shakōki dogū, means "light-blocking device figurine", because its enormous slit eyes reminded archaeologists of Inuit snow goggles. Our tiny replica balances on a fingertip.
Two heads every art student knows
For centuries, art academies collected plaster casts of famous sculptures so students could learn to draw from them. The Laocoön bust, from one of the most famous sculptures of the ancient world, was a favourite, and so was the head of Marcus Agrippa, which appears in Charles Bargue's 19th-century drawing course that students still copy today. These miniatures bring a little of the studio home.
The painting that obsessed Dalí
Millet's The Angelus, now in the Musée d'Orsay, shows a couple pausing in a potato field for the evening prayer. Salvador Dalí became convinced they were really mourning a buried child, and when the painting was later X-rayed, a hidden shape was found beneath the basket. People still argue about it. Ours is a small framed print in an ornate gold frame.
Irises, and a record-breaking sale
Van Gogh painted Irises in his first week at the asylum in Saint-Rémy in 1889. In 1987 it sold for $53.9 million, then an auction record, but the buyer couldn't pay, and it went to the J. Paul Getty Museum, which is why the Getty is credited on this mint-green framed print.