41 facts, each with a source

Art facts

Art facts that are really stories about people. The Mona Lisa became the most famous painting in the world because it was stolen in 1911, the Easter Island heads have bodies, and European painters spent three centuries using a pigment ground from Egyptian mummies. Each one links to its source.

Painting

For three centuries European painters used a rich brown pigment ground from Egyptian mummies.
Van Gogh's yellows are turning white.
The Scream has a tiny insult pencilled on it by the painter.
Painters bought their colours in pig bladders.
Renaissance blue came from lapis lazuli mined in Afghanistan and cost more by weight than gold.
Every Bob Ross painting was made three times.
Mark Rothko took a huge commission to paint murals for a luxury Manhattan restaurant, then ate there, saw the clientele, returned the money and kept the paintings.
One painter left behind 80 portraits of himself.

Sculpture

The Easter Island heads have bodies.
The Terracotta Army was found by farmers digging a well.
Greek and Roman statues were painted in strong colours.
The Venus de Milo's arms have never been found.
Michelangelo signed one sculpture after hearing a stranger credit someone else.
The Statue of Liberty used to be brown.
Michelangelo's David has an oversized head and right hand.

Architecture

A student's question led the engineer of a New York skyscraper to recalculate and find it could be toppled by a strong quartering wind.
The Parthenon contains almost no straight lines.
A B-25 bomber flew into the Empire State Building in fog in 1945.
The Pantheon's dome has stood unreinforced for nineteen centuries because it gets lighter as it rises.

Design

Magenta is not a real colour of light.
Shoppers refused to use the first supermarket trolley.
NASA did not spend millions inventing a pen for space.

Photography

Kodak worked out that the United States had tested a nuclear weapon before it was announced.
The first photograph of a human being was taken by accident in 1838.
Colour photographs are older than the light bulb.

Fashion

Purple had been the colour of emperors for a hard reason.
His accident made that colour cheap overnight.
Pink was widely considered the boy's colour in the early 20th century — a diluted, decisive red.

Art History

The Mona Lisa became the world's most famous painting because it was stolen in 1911.
A famous painting hung upside down in galleries for 75 years.
An artist sold tins of his own excrement at the price of gold.
A banana taped to a wall sold for 6.2 million dollars.
The most expensive painting ever sold may not be by the artist on the label.
When one sculptor secured exclusive artistic rights to the blackest pigment ever made, another artist retaliated with the world's pinkest pink, sold to everyone on Earth except him.
The largest art theft in history is still unsolved, and the museum leaves the frames hanging empty.
The man who painted the Sistine Chapel insisted he was not a painter.
Leonardo wrote his notebooks backwards.
The Bayeux Tapestry is not a tapestry.
One panel of the Ghent Altarpiece was stolen in 1934 and never recovered.
Van Gogh sold almost nothing while he was alive.

More art facts

Ancient languages had no word for blue.