The Seventeenth-Century warship - The Vasa - is Sweden's greatest archeological treasure - nearly 70 meters long and over 50 meters high from keel to mast. With her 64 gun-ports, interspersed with intricate wooden carvings of the ancient gods, she is an awesome sight, dry-docked in her purpose-built, dark, damp museum in the centre of Stockholm.

As a piece of art, she is truly remarkable... which is fortunate really, because a piece of art is all she ever was - as Michelangelo's David was a representation of the ideal man, she was that of the perfect warship. A triumph of form over function, she had more cannon than was anatomically feasible, and she toppled over and sank to the bottom of Stockholm harbor just a few hundred yards into her maiden voyage.

Three-hundred years later, she was raised from her mummified state on the ocean floor, and now the world can gaze in wonder upon her – something that would almost certainly not have been possible if she had sailed successfully. She would have been destroyed in battle, or failing that broken up for scrap at the end of her life. She is a ship we can only see, because she wasn't a real ship... which is, as Alanis Morissette might say, ironic!