In the upper left corner of one of the most recognizable paintings in history, a pencil inscription reads: could only have been painted by a madman. For over a century it was assumed to be vandalism. Infrared scans proved Edvard Munch wrote it himself. This episode traces the biography of The Scream from its origin on Ekeberg Hill above the Oslofjord in January 1892, where an exhausted Munch saw the clouds turn blood red and felt an infinite scream passing through nature, near a slaughterhouse and the asylum where his sister was a patient.

We weigh the competing explanations for that sky, from the 1883 Krakatoa eruption to nacreous polar stratospheric clouds to a straightforward panic attack, and we correct a common misreading: the original title, The Scream of Nature, reveals the figure is covering its ears against the sound, not making it. We look at the cheap cardboard and raw synthetic pigments, the Peruvian mummy from the 1889 Paris exposition that inspired the skeletal face, and the brutal critics who prompted the pencil confession. Then the crime story: the 1994 ladder-and-window theft during the Lillehammer Olympics, the Scotland Yard and Getty sting, the mastermind freed on a technicality, the 2004 armed robbery at the Munch Museum, and the 2012 Sotheby’s sale to Leon Black for nearly 120 million dollars, shadowed by the story of Hugo Simon, who sold it while fleeing the Nazis.

• Four original versions in paint and pastel plus a lithograph
• Why the painting is considered a cornerstone of proto-expressionism
• Andy Warhol’s silkscreens and the desacralizing of the image
• Why the Ghostface mask from Scream was not inspired by Munch
• How The Scream became the face screaming in fear emoji and a candidate for radioactive waste warnings