70 Fun Facts About Art and Literature

Rather than canvas, Leonardo painted the Mona Lisa on what surface?

A white poplar panel carries the portrait, which Leonardo never gave to the sitter's family; he kept it with him until he died in France, where King Francis I acquired it.

Who stole the Mona Lisa from the Louvre in 1911, claiming it belonged in Italy?

Vincenzo Peruggia, a Louvre handyman, hid the painting in his Paris flat for two years and was caught in Florence in December 1913 trying to sell it.

Van Gogh's The Starry Night, from June 1889, shows the view from the window of what?

His asylum room at Saint-Rémy gave him the view, but the village was never in it: Van Gogh added that from imagination.

Two versions of Edvard Munch's The Scream were stolen from museums in which Nordic capital?

Oslo's National Gallery lost its Scream in 1994 and got it back within months, and gunmen took another from the city's Munch Museum in 2004; Munch made four versions in all.

Which Vermeer painting shows a figure in a blue and gold turban, glancing over her shoulder?

Girl with a Pearl Earring is a tronie, the Dutch name for a painted head that was never meant as a portrait, so whoever sat for it, she is a type rather than a named sitter.

Dalí's The Persistence of Memory sold for how much in the early 1930s, soon after he painted it?

$250 bought the small canvas; by Dalí's own account its soft watches were inspired by Camembert cheese, and within two years it had been given to New York's Museum of Modern Art.

Picasso's Guernica, painted in 1937, uses which colours?

Grey, black and white only fill the huge canvas; Picasso refused to let it hang in Spain while Franco ruled, so it stayed in New York until 1981.

Leonardo's The Last Supper is a mural in the refectory of a convent in which city?

Milan's Santa Maria delle Grazie holds the mural; Leonardo painted it on dry plaster instead of in true fresco, so the paint began to flake within a few decades.

Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling between 1508 and 1512 at the commission of which pope?

Julius II pressed the commission on a reluctant Michelangelo, who thought of himself as a sculptor rather than a painter; the chapel takes its name from Sixtus IV, who built it.

Michelangelo's David was commissioned for which Italian cathedral, though it never stood there?

Florence Cathedral's works office ordered David in 1501, but a committee that included Leonardo da Vinci and Botticelli placed the finished giant at the entrance of the Palazzo Vecchio instead.

In Botticelli's The Birth of Venus, the goddess arrives at the shore standing on what?

Venus stands on a giant scallop shell blown ashore by Zephyr; the mid-1480s painting hangs in the Uffizi in Florence.

Why was Rembrandt's The Night Watch cut down on every side in 1715?

To fit into Amsterdam Town Hall, its new home that year, the canvas lost strips from all four sides; they were never found, and a small early copy shows what was cut away.

The two figures in Grant Wood's American Gothic were modelled on his sister and whom?

The family dentist, Byron McKeeby, and Wood's sister Nan posed separately; viewers took the pair for a farmer and his wife, but Nan said her brother meant a father and daughter.

Hokusai's The Great Wave off Kanagawa is the first print in which series?

The Great Wave opens Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, published around 1831, a series whose use of imported Prussian blue revolutionised Japanese printmaking.

Andy Warhol painted 32 canvases in 1962, one for each variety of which product?

Campbell's soup came in 32 varieties, so Warhol painted 32 canvases; first shown in Los Angeles in 1962, they caused a stir that pushed him and pop art into the spotlight.

Klimt's The Kiss includes which materials besides oil paint?

Gold leaf, silver and platinum cover the lovers' robes; the Austrian state bought the canvas at its first showing in 1908, before Klimt had finished one corner of it.

Edward Hopper's Nighthawks shows four people late at night in what setting?

A downtown diner in Hopper's own Greenwich Village inspired the scene, and his wife Jo modelled for the red-haired woman at the counter.

The painting popularly called Whistler's Mother is officially titled what?

Whistler titled it Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1 to stress form over sentiment; the French state bought it in 1891, and it hangs in the Musée d'Orsay.

Rodin's The Thinker was originally conceived as part of which larger commission?

The Thinker was modelled in 1880 to sit atop The Gates of Hell, Rodin's doors for a planned museum; first called The Poet, it represented Dante.

In 1820 a farmer unearthed the Louvre's famous armless Aphrodite on which Greek island?

Milos gave the Venus de Milo its name; France's ambassador acquired the statue almost as soon as it was dug up, and King Louis XVIII had it placed in the Louvre.

Velázquez's Las Meninas hangs in which museum?

The Prado, Madrid holds the huge canvas, in which Velázquez painted himself at his easel while the king and queen appear only as a reflection in a mirror on the back wall.

Which Monet painting did critic Louis Leroy mock in an 1874 review?

Impression, Sunrise shows the port of Le Havre at dawn; Leroy's satirical review used its title as an insult, but it gave the Impressionists their name.

Leonardo's Vitruvian Man, drawn around 1490, shows a man inscribed within which two shapes?

Leonardo fits the figure into a circle and a square at once, following the Roman architect Vitruvius's ideas on ideal human proportion.

A 1978 theory holds the skeletal figure in The Scream was inspired by what, seen in Paris in 1889?

A Peruvian mummy is the model art historian Robert Rosenblum proposed in 1978: Munch could have seen it when he visited Paris for the World's Fair, its hands pressed beside its face.

Which Jane Austen novel began life under the title First Impressions?

Pride and Prejudice began as First Impressions; in 1797 her father offered it to a London publisher, who declined it by return of post, and it waited until 1813 to appear.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Great Britain has been renamed what?

Airstrip One is a mere province of the superstate Oceania; Orwell wrote the novel on the remote Scottish island of Jura, breaking off for tuberculosis treatment, and died months after it appeared.

In Moby-Dick, what is the name of Captain Ahab's whaling ship?

The Pequod, named for a people the narrator calls 'extinct as the ancient Medes', sails from Nantucket; the 1851 novel sold poorly in Melville's lifetime and was hailed as a classic only in the twentieth century.

Don Quixote's real name, before he decides to become a knight-errant, is what?

Alonso Quijano reads so many romances of chivalry that he loses his wits and renames himself Don Quixote; on his deathbed he comes to his senses and gives up knight-errantry.

War and Peace is set during which conflict?

The novel follows Russian families through the Napoleonic Wars, from 1805 to Napoleon's 1812 invasion; an early version was serialised from 1865 before its author rewrote it.

Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird won which award a year after its 1960 publication?

The Pulitzer Prize came in 1961; Lee modelled the character Dill on Truman Capote, her childhood friend and next-door neighbour in Monroeville, Alabama.

Who narrates The Great Gatsby?

Nick Carraway, Gatsby's neighbour and Daisy's cousin, tells the story; Fitzgerald toyed with titles such as Trimalchio and Under the Red, White and Blue, and was never happy with The Great Gatsby.

García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude follows the Buendía family in which fictional town?

Macondo starts as a village founded by José Arcadio Buendía; in the novel's last pages a great wind wipes the town away, together with the last of the Buendía line.

Mary Shelley began Frankenstein after a challenge to write a ghost story issued in 1816 by whom?

Lord Byron proposed the contest at Villa Diodati, near Geneva, while incessant rain kept the party indoors; it also led to his doctor John Polidori's The Vampyre.

Bram Stoker's Dracula is told entirely through what?

Letters, diaries and newspaper cuttings carry the whole tale; Stoker's villain was to be Count Wampyr until, on holiday in Whitby in 1890, he found the name Dracula in a library book.

Homer's Odyssey follows Odysseus's journey home to which island kingdom?

Odysseus spends a decade returning to Ithaca, where Penelope holds off her suitors; like the Iliad the poem has 24 books, and the hero's Latin name is Ulysses.

In Dante's Divine Comedy, who guides the poet through Hell and most of Purgatory?

Virgil stands for human reason, which can take Dante only as far as the threshold of Paradise; there Beatrice, embodying divine grace, takes over as guide.

James Joyce's Ulysses follows Leopold Bloom through a single day in 1904 in which city?

Dublin on 16 June 1904 is the whole setting, a date Joyce picked because it was probably his first outing with Nora Barnacle; fans now mark it each year as Bloomsday.

Charlotte Brontë published Jane Eyre in 1847 under which pen name?

Charlotte wrote as Currer Bell, keeping her own initials, so the book would be judged without the prejudice she felt met women authors; Jane Eyre appeared in October 1847.

Which 1945 book did George Orwell subtitle 'A Fairy Story'?

Animal Farm carried the subtitle A Fairy Story; because it mocked the Soviet Union, then Britain's wartime ally, publishers kept Orwell waiting more than a year to see it in print.

The title Fahrenheit 451 refers to what?

The temperature at which book paper catches fire is how the novel's own title page explains the number, a figure Bradbury had been told when he asked what heat makes paper burn.

In Lord of the Flies, what object do the boys use to call meetings and grant the right to speak?

A conch shell gives its holder the right to speak at assemblies; when Roger's boulder kills Piggy it shatters the shell too, and the last trace of order goes with it.

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was conceived on an 1862 boat trip with whose daughters?

Henry Liddell, dean of Christ Church, Oxford, had three daughters on the July outing; ten-year-old Alice asked Carroll to write the tale down, and the heroine shares her name.

In the Old English epic Beowulf, which monster has raided King Hrothgar's hall for twelve years?

Grendel is angered by the noise of feasting in the hall; Beowulf grips him so hard that the monster's arm tears off at the shoulder, and he flees to his swamp to die.

Chaucer's Canterbury Tales are told by pilgrims travelling to the shrine of which saint?

Thomas Becket, the archbishop murdered in Canterbury Cathedral in 1170, drew pilgrims to his shrine; Chaucer planned about 120 tales for the ride but finished only 24.

In Kafka's The Metamorphosis, salesman Gregor Samsa wakes to find he has become what?

A huge insect is one common rendering of Kafka's 'ungeheueres Ungeziefer', literally monstrous vermin; he chose words that never pin down what kind of creature Gregor has become.

Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart takes its title from a 1919 poem by whom?

W. B. Yeats's 'The Second Coming' supplied the line 'Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold'; Achebe's 1958 story of Okonkwo went on to help spark a renaissance in Nigerian writing.

The Little Prince was first published in 1943 in which country?

Saint-Exupéry wrote it in New York after fleeing occupied France, so it first appeared in the United States in 1943, in English and French; France got its own edition only after the war.

Sherlock Holmes first appeared in print in 1887 in which story?

A Study in Scarlet appeared in Beeton's Christmas Annual for 1887 after Conan Doyle sold all rights to it for £25; the monthly short stories that made Holmes a household name began in the Strand Magazine in 1891.

Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap holds what record?

Longest-running play anywhere: it began as Three Blind Mice, a short radio play made for Queen Mary in 1947, opened in London in 1952 and has paused only for the 2020 pandemic.

Which Russian novelist was passed over for the first Nobel Prize in Literature?

Leo Tolstoy never received the prize; when French poet Sully Prudhomme won in 1901, a group of Swedish writers and artists sent Tolstoy a letter protesting at the Academy's choice.

Which fiction prize, long closed to American authors, opened in 2014 to any novel written in English?

The Booker Prize dropped its Commonwealth and Irish citizenship rule in 2014, and two years later Paul Beatty's The Sellout made him the first American winner.

A traditional Japanese haiku arranges its sound units in what pattern?

5, 7, 5 began as the opening verse of renga, a linked poem that could run to a hundred stanzas; the three short phrases later broke away to stand alone as haiku.

A sonnet traditionally has how many lines?

14 lines is the length the sonnet has kept since 13th-century Sicily; Thomas Wyatt and the Earl of Surrey brought the form to England, where it gained its closing rhymed couplet.

While finishing Crime and Punishment in 1866, Dostoevsky dictated which short novel in under a month?

The Gambler took 26 days of dictation to a young stenographer, Anna Snitkina, to beat a publisher's deadline with the rights to his own work at stake; the two married the next February.

Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, published in 1932, is largely set in what?

A futuristic global State, the World State, counts its years from Henry Ford's first Model T, so the story's year AF 632 works out at about 2540.

Which sixteen-year-old narrates J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye?

Holden Caulfield tells of the days after his expulsion from Pencey Prep, drifting around New York and railing against the 'phoniness' of the adult world; the novel appeared in 1951.

Which is Shakespeare's longest play?

Hamlet runs to more than 4,000 lines and about 30,000 words, yet no single early printing has them all: the 1603, 1604 and 1623 texts each lack passages found in the others.

What is the name of the ageing fisherman in Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea?

Santiago has gone 84 days without a catch when he hooks the giant marlin; he lands it at last, but sharks strip it to a skeleton before he can reach harbour.

Which Early Netherlandish master painted the triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights?

Hieronymus Bosch painted it around 1500; closed, its shutters show the world in grey on the third day of Creation, and Spain's King Philip II, a keen collector of his work, later acquired it.

George Eliot, author of Middlemarch, was the pen name of which writer?

Mary Ann Evans took the male pen name George Eliot so her fiction would be taken seriously; Middlemarch appeared in eight instalments from December 1871 to December 1872.

Van Gogh painted his Arles Sunflowers to decorate a guest room for which fellow artist?

Paul Gauguin found the Sunflowers hanging in his room when he moved into the Yellow House in October 1888; two months later, after a heated quarrel with him, Van Gogh cut off part of his own ear.

Under which pen name did Emily Brontë publish Wuthering Heights in 1847?

Ellis Bell was Emily's disguise; publisher Thomas Newby accepted her novel early but held it back until Jane Eyre had become a hit, then issued it with Anne's Agnes Grey.

Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People celebrates which French uprising, the one that toppled King Charles X?

The July Revolution of 1830 drove out Charles X; the new king's government bought the painting, showed it briefly, then took it down as too inflammatory.

Marcel Duchamp's 1917 readymade Fountain, a porcelain urinal, was signed with what name?

Duchamp signed the urinal 'R. Mutt 1917' and submitted it to the Society of Independent Artists' first show, where it could not be rejected but was hidden from view.

Despite its title, Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon shows a brothel on a street in which city?

Barcelona's Carrer d'Avinyó held the brothel Picasso remembered; he called the canvas 'mon bordel', my brothel, and its first title was The Brothel of Avignon.

Which American artist painted Christina's World, showing a woman in a field?

Andrew Wyeth based it on his Maine neighbour Christina Olson, whose muscle-wasting illness left her unable to walk, yet it was his young wife Betsy who posed for the figure.

Oscar Wilde's only novel, first printed in an American magazine in 1890, is which book?

The Picture of Dorian Gray grew from a London dinner in 1889 at which an American magazine editor commissioned stories from both Wilde and Arthur Conan Doyle.

Which English poet wrote Paradise Lost, the epic of Satan's rebellion?

John Milton was blind by the time it appeared in ten books in 1667; for the 1674 edition, books seven and ten were each split in two to make twelve.

Which novel of a doomed love affair ran in The Russian Messenger in the 1870s?

Anna Karenina reached its first readers there in instalments; its author called it his first true novel, even though War and Peace came earlier.

Eleanor Marx translated which French novel, once prosecuted as obscene, into English in 1886?

Madame Bovary put Flaubert in court in 1857; he was cleared, and the scandal made the novel notorious three decades before Karl Marx's daughter Eleanor translated it.