Image via Complex Original
Since Vasari published his Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects in 1550, those in the art historical field have been rediscovering and dispersing facts and propositions about artists and artworks. Biographical gossip and process-oriented information often don't increase one's phenomenological understanding of art, but they do satiate the curiosity of an art enthusiast. Last night, Francis Bacon's Three Studies of Lucian Freud became the most expensive piece of art ever sold at $142,405,000 at Christie's Post-War & Contemporary Art Evening. As prices for art continue to rise, expensive works gain an almost mythic reputation, increasing curiosity about the true history behind famous pieces. The following 25 tidbits include facts about how artworks like Anish Kapoor's Cloud Gate are kept clean, how artworks are made—like Géricault's research with cadavers, and how artworks like Rembrandt van Rijn's dimming Night Watch have changed since their inception. Go beyond the surface of your favorite pieces with 25 Things You Didn't Know About Famous Works of Art.
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Paul Cézanne was eight miles from Montagne Sainte-Victoire's peak when painting his Mont Sainte-Victoire series.
This means that the mountain took up a very small portion of the scene in front of him though it dominates all of his paintings.
Fact via Courtauld
James Whistler did not consider Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1 a portrait though the painting is popularly known as Whistler's Mother.
Annoyed by the label of portrait, Whistler writes, "Take the picture of my mother, exhibited at the Royal Academy as an Arrangement in Grey and Black. Now that is what it is. To me it is interesting as a picture of my mother; but what can or ought the public do to care about the identity of the portrait?" in his book The Gentle Art of Making Enemies.
Georges Seurat used zinc yellow, a new pigment at the time, to make the yellow highlights on the lawn in A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte which has since darkened to brown.
The browning of the yellow pigment was visible even in Seurat's short lifetime.
There are 21 philosophers represented in Raphael's The School of Athens, but many have not been identified.
Figures like Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Euclid, Ptolemy, Zoroaster, Sodoma, Diogenes, and Raphael himself have been identified, but the rest are still unknown.
Edgar Degas originally planned to sell A Cotton Office in New Orleans to a British textile manufacturer.
The painting became the first work Degas sold to a museum when the Musée des Beaux-arts bought it in 1873.
Caspar David Friedrich's Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog is filled with recognizable mountains from the Elbe Sandstone Mountains.
Zirkelstein, the smallest mountain of Saxon Switzerland, lies to the right, while the hiker stands atop a group of rocks identified as Kaiserkrone, a jagged table mountain.
Rembrandt's The Night Watch, often mistaken for a nocturnal scene, is a depiction of the company in daylight.
The painting was completed in 1642, and the name "Night Watch" wasn't connected to the piece until the 18th century, after the picture had been degraded and significantly dimmed.
Hokusai's The Great Wave off Kanagawa inspired Debussy's La Mer.
Less notably, Hokusai's iconic woodblock print was Quicksilver's logo inspiration.
The Christian knight in Albrecht Durer's Knight, Death, and the Devil may have been based on Erasmus' 1504 book Instructions for the Christian Soldier.
"... You must constantly fight three unfair enemies-the flesh, the devil, and the world-this third rule shall be proposed to you: all of those spooks and phantoms which come upon you as if you were in the very gorges of Hades must be deemed for naught after the example of Virgil's Aeneas ... Look not behind thee," writes Erasmus.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder's The Hunters in the Snow was painted after an unusually harsh winter at the onset of the Little Ice Age.
The painting was also part of a series of paintings about the seasons rooted in the history of calendar scenes.
Emanuel Leutze's original Washington Crossing the Delaware was damaged in a studio fire in 1850, restored and acquired by the Kunsthalle collection in Bremen, and then destroyed in a 1942 British air raid.
Several copies exist with one in MoMA and one in the White House's West Wing.
There are four versions of Edvard Munch's The Scream in different mediums.
An 1895 version was done in pastel on cardboard and a 1910 version was done in tempera on cardboard.
Fact via wiki
Renoir used a number of professional models and also his friends while composing Bal du moulin de la Galette.
Frank Lamy, Norbert Goeneutte, and Georges Rivière were all close friends of Renoir and can be identified around the central table in the painting.
Roy Lichtenstein's Woman with Flowered Hat was based on a 1939-1940 Picasso portrait of Dora Maar.
The painting is the highest priced work of Lichtenstein's that has sold to date.
Though Dalí often called his paintings "hand painted dream photographs," The Persistence of Memory nods at the real in the recognizable depiction of cliffs of Catalonia, Dalí's home.
The Persistence of Memory is often understood as a self-portrait, but his precise painting was meant to "discredit completely the world of reality."
To keep Anish Kapoor's Cloud Gate clean, the sculpture is wiped down with a microfiber cloth twice a day with a solution of water and liquid tide.
Labor and maintenance costs for Cloud Gate cost around $35,000 annually.
Fact via Wbez
Vincent van Gogh painted The Starry Night while in an asylum at Saint-Rémy.
The landscape surrounding the asylum inspired van Gogh to paint The Starry Night, which was completed in daylight from memory.
Monet dug a trench and engineered a pulley system to lower and raise the 2.5 meter tall Women in the Garden as he worked on it.
The trench and pulley system allowed the 26-year-old Monet to maintain a single point of view while working on the entire painting.
Fact via WebMuseum, Paris
Titian's Venus of Urbino was meant to serve as a "teaching" model for Giulia Varano, the wife of the work's patron, Duke of Urbino Guidobaldo II Della Rovere.
A feminist nightmare, Venus of Urbino presents an image of the perfect Renaissance woman, the eroticism of the painting reminding Giulia of her marital "obligations."
Michelangelo's David is made of a mediocre grade of marble.
Researchers using samples from a piece of the sculpture knocked off in an act of vandalism in 1991 analyzed the marble and found it filled with microscopic holes, meaning it degrades quickly.
Thousands of people, including Franz Kafka, lined up at the Louvre to see the empty spot where the Mona Lisa once hung when the painting was stolen in 1911.
Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa was stolen on August 21, 1911. The theft wasn't discovered until the ensuing media frenzy solidified the painting's popularity when it was recovered.
The sheet music in the three versions of Caravaggio's The Lute Player are readable, identifiable pieces of music.
Painted for his patron, Cardinal Del Monte, the sheet music in The Lute Player is recognized as a book by the Flemish composer Arcadelt.
Fact via Caravaggio: The Art of Realism by John Varriano / Penn State Press
There are 17 known versions of Marcel Duchamp's Fountain.
The original urinal from 1917 was either lost or destroyed and only lives on in Alfred Stieglitz's documentation of the piece taken in front of Marsden Hartley's painting The Warriors.
Fact via Cabinet