Dear Dr. Boli: I saw this terra-cotta ornament on an old school on Neville Island, and I wondered whether you, with your iconographical expertise, could explain the symbolism to me. —Sincerely, A Pedestrian.

Dear Sir or Madam: With pleasure. This image, commonly employed at the entrance to a school, represents the torch of learning and the book of fire-safety protocols.

In a hypothetical 1980s 8-bit video game based on the works of prominent Pittsburgh architects…

…this is the monster that eats you if you make a wrong turn in the maze.

Coraopolis Methodist Episcopal Church, 1924, architects T. B. & Lawrence Wolfe. Photograph by Father Pitt.

It is an odd thing to hear astronomers prattle about how the world goes around in circles. It seems far too substantial and solid for that. When you stand on a rock, you do not feel it flying through space at speeds unthinkable: you feel it sitting there in one place, like a rock, the very image of sitting­there­in­one­place­ness.

Yet once in a while Dr. Boli has an experience that makes the circular motion of the earth strangely evident. One of those happened yesterday, thanks to William-Adolphe Bouguereau, the notable French painter. That we are able to call him notable is the thing that makes us feel the movement of the earth.

This curious mental journey began when Dr. Boli remembered visiting an art museum in Ocala, Florida, some years ago, shortly after it was opened. What was the name of the museum? He could not recall; but he could recall that it was on Silver Springs Boulevard east of the city. Google Maps did the rest; the museum was the Appleton Museum of Art, founded to display the collection of a rich fellow named Appleton, who snatched up a wide variety of art, including a first-class collection of Asian art and an important collection of pre-Columbian American art, but also some European masters. (And he also got his hands on the desk on which the Treaty of Versailles, the one that ended the First World War, was signed, because, you know, somebody has to own it.)

The museum site divides the permanent collection into several categories, and the painting chosen to represent the “European” category (the painting you see above) immediately struck Dr. Boli as a Bouguereau. If you know Bouguereau’s work, you know why: the idealized and impossibly clean poor girl staring straight at us is just his sort of thing. That first instinct was right: it was Tricoteuse (“Knitter”) by William-Adolphe Bouguereau.

In his lifetime, which ended in 1905 at a good old age, Bouguereau was the most notable of all living artists. Dr. Boli remembered when his paintings were eagerly absorbed by European aristocrats and American millionaires as fast as M. Bouguereau could turn them out. To own a Bouguereau was the infallible sign that you were a collector of taste and discrimination.

Then Bouguereau died, and within a dizzyingly short time, his reputation plummeted into the gutter. To own a Bouguereau was the infallible sign that you were a philistine. For almost the whole twentieth century, to admit to liking Bouguereau was a gaucherie from which one’s reputation as a connoisseur could never recover. When the Appleton Museum of Art opened in 1987, advertising the museum’s collection of European art with a Bouguereau would have been like advertising the museum’s collection of American art with a painting of Elvis on black velvet. You could have bought that Bouguereau in a flea market for fifteen dollars and a book of S&H Green Stamps. Now it is probably worth hundreds of thousands, if not millions.

The world has spun in a circle.

What does this observation mean? It means either that the art world has come to a cheering and long-deserved appreciation of the skill and talent of the best French Academic painters, or that you should be scouring flea markets for paintings of Elvis on black velvet.

Dr. Boli, I’m genuinely curious… Just how large is your library of marbled prints for the edges of the website?! I don’t think I’ve ever seen it repeat! Or do you have a random generator to produce them or something? —The Shadow.

This was an interesting question, because Dr. Boli did not know the answer—or at least he did not know the whole answer. Part of the answer was easy. The patterns are not randomly generated: they come from various old books and catalogues. They do often repeat, but you would need a very good memory to recall one specific marbled endpaper.

But to the question of how many there are Dr. Boli did not know the answer, so he set his secretary to counting. Here is the census of backgrounds:

77 marbled endpapers

72 tile patterns from various tile manufacturers

48 miscellaneous other backgrounds (such as wallpaper patterns, cloth bindings, fabric prints, and so on)

That makes a total of 197 different backgrounds so far, which is enough for a pleasing variety. The collection grows every time we find something in an old book or catalogue that would make a suitable background.

The resources for building a collection are readily available. Old books at the Internet Archive commonly have marbled endpapers. Catalogues from tile and wallpaper manufacturers are full of patterns.

And, by the way, none of the patterns on this page are in Dr. Boli’s collection yet. It will take a while longer to exhaust the inexhaustible riches of the Internet Archive.

It takes a little practice to crop one of these patterns so that it repeats correctly—perhaps five minutes or so of practice.

Marbled endpapers, of course, cannot be tiled so neatly, but the complex ones are random enough that the seams are not offensive. In that sense, the marble patterns do in fact come from a random generator—namely, the constantly swirling colors on which the paper was laid.

The next time you write a steampunk fantasy, you will want to include some of these. They hold up a marquee on the Fulton Building in Pittsburgh. We could spell it “griffin,” but a splendid creature like this deserves a more pedantic spelling.

Artificial intelligence has changed the way we think about pictures, and that is a very good thing.

Yesterday we ran a picture feature that caused one of our frequent correspondents, who goes by the name Occasional Correspondent, to wonder whether it was produced by AI. It was not; it came from a movie magazine that was 110 years old. But, as our correspondent pointed out,

Suppose that, say, a year or two ago, someone sat down to say, “Chattie! Gin up an issue of Photoplay magazine. Make it from 1914. Include some of Wister’s The Virginian. Include at least one photograph of a dramatic, face-to-face confrontation between cowboys. Post it on the Internet, we’ll see who takes the bait.”

But that way lies madness. Or maybe sanity. Hard to tell.

Dr. Boli would say sanity. Artificial intelligence has done us a great favor, and it was one we never expected. Instead of creating a public ready to swallow any misinformation, AI has taught us all to doubt every picture we see. And that is a very good thing.

A few years ago, National Geographic caused a big stink by moving a pyramid. Someone thought a photograph of the pyramids at Giza was imperfectly composed, and solved the problem by using image-editing software to move one of the pyramids. The picture ran on the cover, where millions saw it, including some who knew how the pyramids were placed in real life. There was a hue, and probably even a cry.

In the next issue, the editors apologized for what they could see, in the cold light of canceled subscriptions, had been a lapse in judgment. They promised never to use image-manipulating software to create a false impression again.

In that same issue in which the apology ran was a picture of an enormous ice bridge under which tiny people could be seen. But the ice bridge was not enormous. It was simply close, and the people were far away. The photographer had used a very-wide-angle lens with almost unlimited depth of field to make an inches-high bow of ice appear to be an enormous bridge. Deceptive? No, because no image-editing software was involved. At least, that seems to have been the decision of the magazine editors. On the other hand, the ordinary reader who was deceived (and Dr. Boli was one of them until he read the surrounding text) might say that it is the deception that matters, not the means of deception. In this case, it was possible to produce a deceptive image with the camera alone, not even resorting to the GIMP or Photoshop.

That brings us back to our original observation. People have begun to tell each other that we can’t rely on pictures anymore, because they may be simply made up. Artificial intelligence has taught us that, but the fact is not new. At least since the discovery of the double exposure by the first photographer who was not perfectly careful and organized with his plates, it has been possible to make photographs that look convincing but depict things that never were. Intelligent people noted for their stories about an extremely rational detective (not to mention any names) took pictures of fairies seriously. Political campaigns have been won by pictures purporting to show people who had never met being perfectly chummy. Most people seem not to have been aware of the extent to which photographs have been manipulated since the dawn of photography, so most people went through their lives trusting that cameras were telling them the truth.

That people have begun to suspect the veracity of photographs now is due almost entirely to the arrival of artificial intelligence. We can thus say that AI has done us a great favor by revealing to all and sundry what was always true about photography. We do not trust the camera anymore. We never should have trusted it, but if our enlightenment comes late it is still a good thing that it comes at all.

Dear Dr. Boli: Every once in a while I hear people talk about the “seven arts.” But they never say which seven they mean. Can you provide a canonical list of the seven arts, or will I have to go to Reddit and take my chances? —Sincerely, M. R. Jackson, Chairman, National Endowment for the Arts.

Dear Madam: The canonical list of the seven arts is updated periodically by the competent authorities, so it is important to keep up to date, which you can easily do by paying a small annual subscription fee to Competent Authorities LLC. For example, the list promulgated in August of 1971 specified the seven arts as tie-dye, macramé, protest songs, macaroni painting, carpet bombing, free verse, and laugh tracks. If you mistook that for a current list, you would be accused of wallowing in nostalgia. Here is the most recent list of the seven arts as it was announced in April of this year:

Graffiti
AI prompting
Tattoo removal
Auto-Tune
Telephone scams
Article-spinning
Tragic backstories

Our friend Father Pitt published some pictures of the Alcoa Corporate Center on the North Shore in Pittsburgh. It is a striking building that makes a good advertisement for aluminum as a building material, but to Dr. Boli’s eyes it seemed to be missing something. It took a while to decide exactly what it needed, but at last it came to him in a flash.

This building needs appropriately scaled Lionel trains.

In the 1930s, this happy suburban family in Mount Lebanon, south of Pittsburgh, ordered the Build-Your-Own Traditional Pennsylvania Farmhouse Kit. And they lived happily ever after.

This unfortunate family ordered the same kit—

—but they lost the assembly instructions.