Napoleon's March to Moscow

Widely considered the greatest statistical graphic ever drawn. Minard’s 1869 map traces Napoleon’s catastrophic 1812 Russian campaign, encoding six variables in a single image: the army’s size (width of the band), location (geographic path), direction of movement (color: tan for advance, black for retreat), temperature during the retreat (scale at bottom), dates, and geographic coordinates.

Edward Tufte called it possibly “the best statistical graphic ever drawn” in The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. The graphic tells a devastating story without a single word of narrative — the army shrinks from 422,000 soldiers to just 10,000 survivors, and the plummeting temperatures on the retreat make the cause viscerally clear.

What makes it timeless is the information density achieved with elegant simplicity. No chart junk, no decoration — every mark encodes data. It remains the gold standard for multivariate storytelling in a static image.