We explore some general properties of minimal surfaces, and their historical origins. I am particularly interested in the Schwarz surface, which is spanned by a regular tetrahedral skew quadrilateral. We use the Weierstrass-Enneper representation formulas to derive the analytic function $R(\omega)$ obtained by Schwarz and use a representation in terms of elliptic integrals to investigate the relation to the hyperbolic paraboloid.