Useless Facts On Art & Artists
There is only one picture by an American hanging in the Louvre—Whistler's Mother. Whistler's Mother, however is only the painting's popular name; its official title is Arrangement in Black and Gray: The Artist's Mother.
In his last days, the painter Pierre Renoir was so crippled with arthritis that he had to have the brushes tied to his arms in order to execute his paintings.
During the Napoleonic wars, Napoleon's soldiers bivouacked in the chapel of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, where Leonardo's Last Supper is located. The soldiers used the painting in target practice, shooting at the central figure of Christ's head. This is why the face of Christ is almost obliterated in the painting.
The Largest stained-glass window in the world used to be at Kennedy International Airport in New York City. It could be seen on the American Airlines terminal building and measured 300 feet long by 23 feet high.
Indian-miniature painters of the Kangra school used brushes so fine that they were sometimes made of a single hair. A painter of Indian miniatures would often apprentice for ten years before he was allowed to pick up a brush. The colors used by this school of artists were made of such strange substances as crushed beetles, ground lapis la-zuli, and blood.
The statue by Auguste Rodin that has come to be called The Thinker was not meant to be a portrait of man in thought. It is a portrait of the poet Dante.
Equestrain statues: traditionally when all four of the horse's hooves are on the ground, it signifies that the rider died a natural death. One hoof in the air indicates that he died of wounds sustained in action. If two are raised, it means that the rider was killed on the field of battle.
Things you may not know about the Mona Lisa:
- She has no eyebrows (it was the fashion in Renaissance Florence to shave them off).
- The real name of the painting is not Mona Lisa. It is La Giaconda. It is a portrait of a middle-class Florentine woman, the wife of a merchant named Francesco del Giacondo.
- The painting measures less than 2 feet by 2 feet.
- An entire opera was written about the painting by Max von Schillings.
- X-rays of Mona Lisa show that there are three completely different versions of the same subject, all painted by Leonardo, under the final portrait.
The seventeenth-century Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens often didn't paint his own pictures. His procedure was to set up the canvas, draw in preliminary outlines, sketch in the various figures, and design the color scheme. He turned the actual painting over to members of his atelier, a veritable factory of skilled painters, some of whom specialized in painting flowers, some in fruit, some in birds, candles, or even beards. Van Dyck, one of the greatest of all Flemish painters, was a member of this great studio.
The horns protruding from the head of the famous statue of Moses by Michelangelo were a mistake! It is true that the Bible describes Moses as having hrons coming from his head. This however, was an error on the part of the translators. In Hebrew the words for “Horn” and “Ray of light” are spelled identically. The translators misinterpreted “Ray” for “Horn” and thus Moses is often portrayed in western art as looking like a devil.
The Spanish painter Velázquez was official court painter to King Philip IV when he was twenty-six.
Currier and Ives published more than 7,000 prints. They ran a large factory with hundreds of employees, including many full-staff artists. Through their prints are rare and expensive today, they originally sold for 10 cents apiece.
Ancient Chinese artists freely painted scenes of nakedness and coition. Never, absolutely never, would they depict a simple bare female foot.
The Venetian painter Tintoretto (1518-1594) once painted a picture of Paradise that was 72 feet long. It was made for the Doge's palace in Venice.
The painting Saint Jerome by Leonardo da Vinci, one of the great art treasures of the world, was discovered in a junk shop in the nineteenth century. Though highly valued for several centuries after its creation and kept in a special cabinet by its owner, Angelica Kauffman (a painter herself), the painting disappeared when Kauffman died in 1804. Ten years later Cardinal Joseph Fesch, an uncle of Napoleon, was exploring an antique shop in Rome one day and came upon an old box, the lid of which displayed this very Saint Jerome—minus its head. An astute collector, the cardinal recognized the work at once and bought it. Then came the real miracle. Several months later, while browsing in another back alley in Rome, Cardinal Fesch found a head of Saint Jerome that so resembled his work by Leonardo that he purchased it immediately. He brought it home and placed the head with the body. Remarkably, it fit. Thus one of the great paintings of the world was saved for posterity.
The Discus Thrower by Myron, one of the most famous of all Greek statues, is not Greek at all. The statue as we know it today is a restoration assembled in the nineteenth century from pieces of a Roman copy of the Greek original.
The French painter Rosa Bonheur (1822-1899) kept lions, monkeys gazelles, chamois, goats, and deer in her back yard. She maintained this menagerie so that she might study animal anatomy firsthand.
The impressionist painter Claude Monet (1840-1926) painted more than three hundred of the same lily pads. The now-famous plants grew in a pond behind his house.
The painting Saint Jerome by Leonardo da Vinci, one of the great art treasures of the world, was discovered in a junk shop in the nineteenth century. Though highly valued for several centuries after its creation and kept in a special cabinet by its owner, Angelica Kauffman (a painter herself), the painting disappeared when Kauffman died in 1804. Ten years later Cardinal Joseph Fesch, an uncle of Napoleon, was exploring an antique shop in Rome one day and came upon an old box, the lid of which displayed this very Saint Jerome—minus its head. An astute collector, the cardinal recognized the work at once and bought it. Then came the real miracle. Several months later, while browsing in another back alley in Rome, Cardinal Fesch found a head of Saint Jerome that so resembled his work by Leonardo that he purchased it immediately. He brought it home and placed the head with the body. Remarkably, it fit. Thus one of the great paintings of the world was saved for posterity.
Before 1800, only two women achieved fame as artists. Both were painters. One was Italian named Rosalba Carriera (1675-1757), who popularized the use of pastels in Paris; the other, Marie Anne Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun (1755-1842), was a French portraitist who gained fame for her paintings of European royalty.
In his youth Adolf Hitler was a landscape and portrait painter, and according to some who have seen his work, not a bad one. It was Hitler's inability to get into the Vienna Art Academy, it has been said, that caused him to hate that city forever. Of Hitler's three hundred paintings, only about twelve still exist. Four or five of these are in the United States.
In the late Middle Ages, when a church member of patron of the arts commissioned a portrait of a saint, he generally had himself and his family painted into the picture. These pictures, known today as “donor portraits,” depict the holy personalities many times larger than the donors, a symbolic statement concerning the relative importance of ordinary man compared with the divine. Today such pictures provide a wealth of information about how people looked and dressed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
An American artist named John Banvard (1815-1891) once painted a picture a mile long. As a youth, Banvard longed to become famous, and at the age of twenty-five he concocted the scheme of painting a colossal mural depicting 1,2000 miles of landscape along the Mississippi River. Camping out along the Mississippi for more than a year, Banvard lived on hunted game and worked his way slowly upriver, making thousands of sketches as he traveled. He then returned to Louisville, built himself a studio, and furnished it with a mile of canvas. In order to keep the canvas manageable, he wrapped it around a large upright roller and pulled it out as needed, much the way one pulls paper towels off a dispenser. The part of the canvas that was painted was then rolled up on another large drum. According to people who saw the work in progress, the quality of craftsmanship was quite good, depicting, as one witness reported, “the remarkable truthfulness of the minutest objects upon the shores of the river.” On its completion in 1846, the painting was displayed in Louisville, where it was an immediate success. Banvard then took it on tour across the United States and to Great Britain. The Picture received international acclaim, and he soon became quite wealthy. When Banvard died, however, the painting disappeared. It was last seen in Watertown, South Dakota, where strips of it were bing used as a stage set. Just how good this painting actually was we will never know, for no contemporary photographs of it exist.
Auguste Rodin (1840-1917), one of the great French sculptors, was allowed to freeze to death by the French government even though it knew of his plight and could have saved him. Rodin, forgotten in the last years of his life, was refused financial aid several times by the French state, even while the statues he had donated to the country were kept warmly housed in museums. In the winter of 1917 Rodin's application for a room in one of these museums was rejected, and a month later he died in a garret from frostbite.
Leonardo da Vinci's painting The Last Supper is perhaps the finest known example of the High Renaissance style, and is considered one of the greatest art treasures of the world. Yet the painting as we know it today can in no way be considered an original. Leonardo painted his masterpiece on the refectory wall of the monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan between 1495 and 1497. He worked at it in fits and starts, finally leaving it unfinished (the picture was largely unappreciated in its time). By 1517, the work had already been seriously damaged by dampness, and a few years later the famous art historian Vasari referred to it as “merely a mass of blots”. By the following century monks inhabiting the monastery had lost all respect for the work and had broken a doorway through Christ's legs. The painting continued to decay, and in 1796 a garrison of French soldiers occupied the monastery and quartered their horses in the same room as the painting. The soldiers whiled away the time taking target practice at Christ's head. During World War II sandbags were piled against the painting to protect it from bombing. Nonetheless, a bomb landed squarely on the monastery and demolished the building, though miraculously most of the wall on which The Last Supper was painted was spared. All this abuse, however, more or less destroyed the painting, and The Last Supper that people see today is a heavily restored work in which only the outlines and a few brush strokes are by Leonardo.
The Italian Renaissance painter Fra Filippo Lippi, while chaplain of the Convent of Santa Margherita in Prato, ran off with Lucrezia Buti, one of the young nuns. Lucrezia later bore Fra Filippo's son, Filippino Lippi, who himself became famous painter. Fra Filippo is said to have used his abducted nun as the model for all the Madonnas he painted.
Through the Italian Renaissance flourished in Rome, not a single Renaissance artist, sculptor, or musician of any stature was born in that city. During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, practically all architects, painters, sculptors, and musicians were imported to Rome. When they had completed their projects, they almost always departed.
In his lifetime, Samuel Morse (1791-1872), inventor of the telegraph, was better known as a painter than as a scientist. Morse studied art at Yale University, where his specialty was ivory carving. In 1812, he won the gold medal from the Adelphi Society of Arts in England for his stilllifes, and the following year his painting The Dying Hercules was shown at the Royal Academy, where it was rated among the nine best pictures in the exhibition. Within ten years Morse was internationally known as a portrait painter, and his rendering of the Marquis de Lafayette still hands in New York's City Hall. It was only when Morse was in his forties that he became interested in telegraphic communication.
Anna Mary Robertson “Grandma” Moses (1860-1961), the famous American artist, did not start painting full-time until she was in her seventies. Once she began, however, she was nothing if not prolific. She painted steadily until the year she died, and her total output was about 1,600 paintings and 85 ceramic tiles.