What shape do you see in the image above? Many of us have thought for a moment that we had found a unique shape in the silhouette of a rock, in a stain on the wall, in the dregs of our morning coffee, or even in a passing cloud. Because this is the illustration of a very rich chapter in the history of psychology, phenomenology and semiotics, signed by the Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach, inventor of the homonymous test that popularized it.

Despite being most recognized by the use of experimental and heterodox methods, the creator of psychoanalysis had also a narrow bond with archeology. In true, bond is a modest term to quote someone that had owned a collection with more than 2,000 articles — practically all of them originals — of antiquities from Egypt, Greece, Rome, and China.