Art and Literature Trivia
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70 free Art and Literature trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
56 free art and literature trivia questions with answers. These art and literature trivia questions are the classic Trivial Pursuit brown-wedge round, done properly. Half the quiz is art: the Mona Lisa's theft, what The Starry Night looks out on, why The Night Watch was trimmed, who posed for American Gothic, how many soup cans Warhol painted, what The Thinker was thinking about and where the Venus de Milo was dug up. The other half is literature: Ahab's ship, Airstrip One, Macondo, the conch, Bloomsday, the ghost-story bet that produced Frankenstein, the pen names of the Brontës, and the first Nobel laureate who beat Tolstoy. The questions range from ones any reader or gallery-goer will get to ones that need a good memory for dates and titles. It works as a stand-alone round for a pub quiz, a school or book-club warm-up, or a test of your own general culture. Every answer has been checked against Wikipedia and museum or publisher records, and each question shows its citation once you have answered.
30 of 70 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Rather than canvas, Leonardo painted the Mona Lisa on what surface?
A white poplar panel
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.
Q 02Who stole the Mona Lisa from the Louvre in 1911, claiming it belonged in Italy?
Vincenzo Peruggia
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.
Q 03Van Gogh's The Starry Night, from June 1889, shows the view from the window of what?
His asylum room at Saint-Rémy
His asylum room at Saint-Rémy gave him the view, but the village was never in it: Van Gogh added that from imagination.
Q 04Two versions of Edvard Munch's The Scream were stolen from museums in which Nordic capital?
Oslo
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.
Q 05Which Vermeer painting shows a figure in a blue and gold turban, glancing over her shoulder?
Girl with a Pearl Earring
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.
Q 06Dalí's The Persistence of Memory sold for how much in the early 1930s, soon after he painted it?
$250
$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.
Q 07Picasso's Guernica, painted in 1937, uses which colours?
Grey, black and white only
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.
Q 08Leonardo's The Last Supper is a mural in the refectory of a convent in which city?
Milan
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.
Q 09Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling between 1508 and 1512 at the commission of which pope?
Julius II
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.
Q 10Michelangelo's David was commissioned for which Italian cathedral, though it never stood there?
Florence Cathedral
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.
Q 11In Botticelli's The Birth of Venus, the goddess arrives at the shore standing on what?
A giant scallop shell
Venus stands on a giant scallop shell blown ashore by Zephyr; the mid-1480s painting hangs in the Uffizi in Florence.
Q 12Why was Rembrandt's The Night Watch cut down on every side in 1715?
To fit into Amsterdam Town Hall
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.
Q 13The two figures in Grant Wood's American Gothic were modelled on his sister and whom?
The family dentist
Q 21Velázquez's Las Meninas hangs in which museum?
The Prado, Madrid
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.
Q 22Which Monet painting did critic Louis Leroy mock in an 1874 review?
Impression, Sunrise
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.
Q 23Leonardo's Vitruvian Man, drawn around 1490, shows a man inscribed within which two shapes?
A circle and a square
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.
Q 14Hokusai's The Great Wave off Kanagawa is the first print in which series?
Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji
The Great Wave opens Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, published around 1831, a series whose use of imported Prussian blue revolutionised Japanese printmaking.
Q 15Andy Warhol painted 32 canvases in 1962, one for each variety of which product?
Campbell's soup
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.
Q 16Klimt's The Kiss includes which materials besides oil paint?
Gold leaf, silver and platinum
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.
Q 17Edward Hopper's Nighthawks shows four people late at night in what setting?
A downtown diner
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.
Q 18The painting popularly called Whistler's Mother is officially titled what?
Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1
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.
Q 19Rodin's The Thinker was originally conceived as part of which larger commission?
The Gates of Hell
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.
Q 20In 1820 a farmer unearthed the Louvre's famous armless Aphrodite on which Greek island?
Milos
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.
Leonardo fits the figure into a circle and a square at once, following the Roman architect Vitruvius's ideas on ideal human proportion.
Q 24A 1978 theory holds the skeletal figure in The Scream was inspired by what, seen in Paris in 1889?
A Peruvian mummy
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.
Q 25Which Jane Austen novel began life under the title First Impressions?
Pride and Prejudice
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.
Q 26In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Great Britain has been renamed what?
Airstrip One
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.
Q 27In Moby-Dick, what is the name of Captain Ahab's whaling ship?
Pequod
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.
Q 28Don Quixote's real name, before he decides to become a knight-errant, is what?
Alonso Quijano
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.
Q 29War and Peace is set during which conflict?
The Napoleonic Wars
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.
Q 30Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird won which award a year after its 1960 publication?
The Pulitzer
The Pulitzer Prize came in 1961; Lee modelled the character Dill on Truman Capote, her childhood friend and next-door neighbour in Monroeville, Alabama.