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The story of the conversion of Norway's Vikings has long focused on how the country's kings converted to Christianity, then ordered their subjects to, as King Olaf Trygvesson put it in A.D. 996, "Be Christian or die." (See Issue 63: Conversion of the Vikings.)

But new radiological dating of a stave church site, first unearthed in 2001, may change that story significantly. Archaeologists say the church in Skien (the birthplace of playwright Henrik Ibsen, about 70 miles southwest of Oslo) was built between A.D. 1010 and 1040, after the deaths of Christian kings Olaf Trygvesson (d. 1000) and the canonized Olaf Haraldsson (d. 1030). But two Christian graves at the site date between 885 and 990, which (along with some other findings) University of Oslo medievalist Jon Vidar Sigurdsson says would push the date of Norway's conversion to the 800s, not the turn of the millennium. Jan Brendalsmo, archaeologist for the Foundation for Cultural Heritage Research agrees. "It is fun to see confirmation of what we have long believed, that there was a Christianization of Norway long before the two Olavs came," he told the newspaper Aftenposten.

At last: a Da Vinci mystery that has nothing to do with Dan Brown. Art historians agree that the Tondo (round) painting of the Adoration of the Christ Child, on display at Rome's Galleria Borghese, is one of the finest Renaissance oil paintings of its kind. What they haven't agreed on is its artist. Since the 1790s, historians have attributed it to Raphael, Ghirlandaio, Lorenzo di Credi, and others. Since 1926, Fra Bartolomeo's name has been on the adjoining plaque. Others, however, have speculated that Leonardo da Vinci may have had a hand. A hand indeed: Restorers have uncovered in the painting that most archetypical of clues, a fingerprint. "I wouldn't have found it if I hadn't been using my microscope," Elizabetta Zatti told The Guardian. "It's clearly a fingerprint left while the paint was still wet, but we don't really know whose finger it belongs to." But they have a good guess: Leonardo deliberately left fingerprints in some works as a signature of sorts, and some of the techniques and colors in the painting match his style. Researchers are now comparing the print with one on Leonardo's Lady with an Ermine, in Krakow, Poland.

St. Peter's Basilica was no easy destination this spring, as hundreds of thousands of pilgrims traveled to Vatican City to pay their last respects to Pope John Paul II. Americans preferring to stay stateside but still see the interior of the grand church while honoring the late pope have a rare opportunity to do so: The Pope John Paul II Cultural Center in Washington, D.C., happened to be exhibiting Michelangelo's original 18-foot-tall wooden model of the basilica dome as part of a large exhibit on the creation of the church. The model continues to be used when repair or restorations are needed on the actual church, and Michelangelo himself condemned builders for being less careful in their construction than he was in making the model. "The model, such as I make for everything, was exact," he scolded in a 1557 letter. The exhibit will be in Washington, D.C., through May 31, 2005, then travels to Germany.

Ninian may not have been the first to take the gospel to the Picts in what is now Scotland, but he's the first to get credit for it. His stone church in what is now Whithorn was named Candida Casa, the white house, because the locals had never seen such a structure before. It became a major monastic center, drawing students from Ireland and Wales, but the white walls eventually crumbled.

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