Cold in western culture has had a rather idiosyncratic presence: from the toilsome transportation of Alpine ice in ancient times to the villas and palaces all the way to Rome (so that the chosen few would enjoy their wine chilled) to the systematic research by the doyen of experimentalists, Robert Boyle, on the nature of cold in the seventeenth century, to the liquefaction of gases in the eighteenth century, to the creation of the "coldest spot on earth" in Leiden in 1908, to the

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... e properties of helium at these very low temperatures, to the large scale production of liquid gases for medical and other needs, to the generalized practice of freezing foodstuffs, to the indispensable home refrigerator -in brief: the production and consumption of artificial cold has left deep imprints on an amazing number of scientific and technological developments and has raised fundamental issues in economics, sociology and anthropology. 2 Perhaps the most intriguing presence of cold is found in one of the defining texts of western culture, namely Dante Alighieri's La Divina Commedia. In Inferno it is not so much the deathly heat of flames that do the eternal punishing. Against all "expectations", Satan is portrayed in many illustrations as a giant beast, half of his body immersed in ice at the center of Hell, as in Gustave Doré's famous xylograph version made around 1860. ◊ fig. 1 Satan beats his wings, and the cold wind is a continuous reminder that there is not an instant of reprieve for the sinners. For a public less familiar with Dante there would be another person to incite their imagination, Walt Disney. The myth about the presumed freezing of his body kindled expectations that the creator of immortal genre figures would himself be reborn at a "later date"! Ample supply of liquid nitrogen and some technical issues in the freezing process itself were sufficient to do the trick for anyone.