275 Fun Facts About Art History

The giant stone figures called moai were carved by the Rapa Nui people of which Pacific island?

Easter Island's moai are often called heads, but they have full bodies: many near the quarry are simply buried to the shoulders, which fed the myth.

What classical sculpture technique involves a figure standing with most of its weight on one foot, resulting in a relaxed, asymmetrical pose?

Contrapposto first appears in the Kritios Boy of about 480 BCE, which breaks from the rigid frontal stance of the earlier kouroi.

Which technique, perfected in the Mona Lisa, softens edges by blending tones without hard outlines?

Sfumato comes from the Italian sfumare, to fade out like smoke; Leonardo wanted tones to merge 'without lines or borders', and the art historian Ernst Gombrich argued that this is why her mouth and eyes look so ambiguous.

Which Italian term names the strong contrast of light and shadow used to model volume?

Chiaroscuro, Italian for light-dark, also names a kind of print: 16th-century Italian woodcutters printed each tone from a separate block to imitate ink-wash drawings.

Which Manet painting scandalised the Paris Salon of 1865 with a frank nude whose details marked her as a prostitute?

Olympia's confrontational gaze did the damage: she stares straight at the viewer, and details in the picture identified her as a prostitute.

What did Marcel Duchamp call an ordinary manufactured object he simply chose and declared art, such as his 1917 urinal 'Fountain'?

Readymade was the everyday word for mass-produced goods as opposed to handmade ones; Duchamp borrowed it for objects he merely chose, an antidote to what he called 'retinal' art.

Whose 1924 Surrealist Manifesto beat a rival version by Yvan Goll to define the movement?

André Breton's manifesto actually came second: Goll's appeared two weeks earlier, but Breton's group won the quarrel over the name and he led the movement for decades.

What genre of three-dimensional art transforms an entire room into an immersive environment?

Installation Art grew out of the room-filling 'Environments' that Allan Kaprow began making in the late 1950s; the viewer walks into the work instead of standing in front of it.

Which artist created Cloud Gate, the giant mirrored sculpture in Chicago's Millennium Park nicknamed 'The Bean'?

Anish Kapoor's 110-ton sculpture is built from 168 welded plates polished until every seam vanished; the public nicknamed it 'The Bean' months before he gave it its real title.

What are the tall carved wooden sculptures of Pacific Northwest Coast Indigenous cultures called?

Totem poles are carved from red cedar and work like a family's signboard: their stacked figures record crests, ancestry and events worth remembering.

Which Italian Renaissance painter is known for the masterpiece 'The Birth of Venus'?

Botticelli put grace before anatomy: his Venus has an improbably long neck, and her swaying stance is one that no real body could hold without toppling over.

Which movement, formed in Paris after World War I, aimed to let the unconscious express itself in dreamlike scenes?

Surrealism took Freud's ideas about free association and dream analysis as the tools for liberating the imagination.

The Great Pyramid of Giza was built as a tomb for which pharaoh?

Khufu was painted by the Greek historian Herodotus, two thousand years later, as a cruel tyrant, yet Egyptian tradition also remembered him as a wise ruler.

Which Florentine goldsmith-turned-architect designed the vast brick dome of Florence Cathedral, finished in 1436?

Filippo Brunelleschi had lost the contest for the Baptistery's bronze doors to Lorenzo Ghiberti; two decades later he beat the same rival to win the commission for the dome.

What French term describes painting outdoors in front of the subject, a habit the Impressionists made famous?

En plein air painting took off in the 19th century once collapsible metal paint tubes let artists carry ready-mixed colours out into the fields.

What name did Andy Warhol give his silver-painted New York studio?

The Factory, a Manhattan loft lined with tin foil and silver paint, ran almost like a production line: assistants helped Warhol print his silkscreens in bulk.

What name is given to the arched stone props that brace the outer walls of many Gothic cathedrals?

Flying buttresses carry the outward push of the stone vault across to free-standing piers, so the walls between could be thinned and opened up for huge stained-glass windows.

Which Mughal emperor built the Taj Mahal at Agra as a tomb for his wife Mumtaz Mahal?

Shah Jahan was deposed by his son Aurangzeb in 1658 and spent his last years confined in Agra Fort, within sight of the tomb where he too was finally buried.

The 'kouros' and 'kore' figures are characteristic sculptures from which period of Ancient Greek art?

Archaic kouroi stand stiff and frontal with one foot forward, a pose Greek sculptors seem to have borrowed from Egyptian statues; the faint 'Archaic smile' is their other trademark.

Which artist is famous for unflinching self-portraits painted in a vivid Mexican folk style?

Frida Kahlo began painting while recovering from a bus crash at 18, using a special easel and a mirror fixed overhead so that she could be her own model.

Which American painter's 'Madame X' caused such a scandal at the 1884 Paris Salon that he soon moved to London?

John Singer Sargent first showed her with one jewelled strap slipping off her shoulder; after the outcry he repainted it in place, and he later called the portrait the best thing he had done.

Claude Monet spent his last decades painting the water-lily pond he built at his home in which French village?

Giverny's lily pond was Monet's own work: in 1893 he bought a marshy plot beside his property, dug a pond and had a nearby stream diverted to fill it.

What painting technique forms images from small distinct dots of colour that the viewer's eye blends?

Pointillism rested on the colour science of its day: instead of mixing paints on the palette, which dulls them, Seurat set pure dots side by side to blend, brighter, in the viewer's eye.

Which movement, pioneered by Braque and a Spanish partner around 1907-08, showed objects from many viewpoints at once?

Cubism's Spanish partner was Picasso; he and Braque worked so closely in those years that Braque later said it was 'like being roped together on a mountain'.

Which French artist designed the bold 1890s posters that advertised the Moulin Rouge cabaret?

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec made his first poster, for the Moulin Rouge, in 1891; pasted on walls all over Paris, it won him fame, and he went on to design about thirty in all before dying at 36.

Which Japanese artist created the iconic woodblock print 'The Great Wave off Kanagawa'?

Hokusai made the wave when he was about 70, and later wrote that nothing he had drawn before that age was worth notice.

The Roman Colosseum was primarily used for what type of events?

Gladiatorial contests filled the amphitheatre, which held some 50,000 people and also staged animal hunts and executions; ancient writers say it was even flooded for mock sea battles.

Which art movement emphasized order, clarity and Greek and Roman models, reacting against Rococo?

Neoclassicism took off after the buried Roman towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum were rediscovered in the 18th century, firing a new craze for all things Greek and Roman.

Which late 18th–early 19th century art movement glorified emotion, individualism and nature?

Romanticism pushed back against Enlightenment rationalism, prizing intuition, the sublime and the medieval past over classical order.

Which artist created the iconic painting 'The Scream'?

Edvard Munch made four versions; one was stolen from the National Gallery and another, at gunpoint, from the Munch Museum a decade later, and both were recovered.

Which style of around 1900 borrowed the sinuous curves of plants and flowers?

Art Nouveau designers set out to copy no past era, in revolt against the borrowed historical styles of the 1800s; Italians called it Stile Liberty after the London store that sold its fabrics.

Which international art movement, born at Zürich's Cabaret Voltaire during World War I, rejected prevailing ideas about art itself?

Dada began at the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916 with sound poems and nonsense performances, a protest against the war, and soon had groups in Berlin, Paris and New York.

Which post-WWII New York School movement is known for large canvases and gestural brushwork?

Abstract Expressionism won such influence on both sides of the Atlantic that it shifted the creative centre of modern painting from Paris to New York.

Which art movement incorporated imagery from advertising, comic books and supermarket shelves?

Pop Art was not purely American: it emerged in Britain in the 1950s too, where young London artists were fascinated by American adverts, comics and films.

Gold-ground icons, glittering mosaics and stylized frontal figures are hallmarks of which empire's art?

Byzantine art made the icon its signature genre, and its gold-leaf and mosaic techniques travelled to Italy and shaped early Italian painting.

Which painter completed 'The Ghent Altarpiece' in 1432 after it was begun by his brother Hubert?

Jan van Eyck finished the Ghent Altarpiece in 1432 after Hubert's death in 1426; two panels were stolen in 1934 and the Just Judges has never been recovered.

Which Dutch painter created 'The Garden of Earthly Delights'?

Hieronymus Bosch even wrote music into its hell panel: a score is inscribed across one sinner's buttocks, and in 2014 a student transcribed the tune and posted a recording.

Which early-1600s Italian painter is known for radical naturalism and dramatic spotlighting against darkness?

Caravaggio killed a man in a brawl in 1606 and fled Rome under sentence of death; he spent his last four years on the run, still painting, in Naples, Malta and Sicily.

Which Delft painter, who left only about three dozen pictures, painted 'The Milkmaid' and 'Girl with a Pearl Earring'?

Johannes Vermeer was little known outside Delft and Amsterdam for two centuries, until the French critic Théophile Thoré championed his work in the 1800s.

Which French-American sculptor made Maman, a spider some nine metres tall that stands outside museums from Bilbao to Ottawa?

Louise Bourgeois called the spider an ode to her mother, who like a spider was a weaver and, she said, her best friend.

Which American painter developed his famous 'drip' technique after moving to Springs, New York, laying canvases on the floor?

Jackson Pollock poured and splashed household paint onto canvases laid flat on the floor so he could work them from every angle.

Which Dutch abstract pioneer painted geometric grids of primary colors and black lines?

Piet Mondrian co-founded De Stijl with Theo van Doesburg in 1917 and dropped an 'a' from his surname to fit in with the Parisian avant-garde.

Which performance artist sat silently opposite visitors for hours a day in 'The Artist Is Present' at MoMA in 2010?

Marina Abramović sat motionless for more than 700 hours in all, while elsewhere in the retrospective a company of performers re-enacted her earlier pieces.

Which pseudonymous, England-based street artist is known for politically charged stencil graffiti around the world?

Banksy says he turned to stencils after hiding from police under a lorry, where the stencilled lettering above his head showed him a faster way to work.

Which period of Italian art did the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood want to return to?

Quattrocento, the Italian 1400s, was their ideal: the Brotherhood prized the detail and direct study of nature they saw in painting from before Raphael and the High Renaissance.

Which English Romantic painter of storms and seas grew nearly abstract in his old age?

J.M.W. Turner left his finished paintings to the nation; after relatives contested the will, almost the whole contents of his studio became public property, now mostly at Tate Britain.

Which French sculptor created 'The Thinker' and 'The Kiss'?

Auguste Rodin's breakthrough nude, The Age of Bronze, looked so lifelike in 1877 that he was accused of casting it from a living model.

The ancient Greek sculptor Myron is best known for a statue of an athlete doing what?

Throwing a discus: Myron's bronze Discobolus of about 450 BC is lost, and we know it only because Romans admired it enough to carve marble copies.

Which Florence museum was begun in 1560 to house the Medici's magistrates?

The Uffizi kept Florence's magistrates downstairs, but after Cosimo I died his son Francesco had the top floor turned into a gallery for the Medici family's art treasures.

Which artist covered a Tate Modern floor with 100 million hand-painted porcelain sunflower seeds in 2010?

Ai Weiwei had every seed made by hand in the porcelain town of Jingdezhen; visitors could walk on them for only a few days before the ceramic dust was judged a health risk.

Which Louvre painting became a worldwide sensation after an Italian handyman walked out with it in 1911?

Mona Lisa was missing for more than two years; when the Louvre reopened after the theft, crowds queued just to stare at the empty space on the wall.

What is the name for a stone coffin, such as those that held Egyptian pharaohs?

Sarcophagus is Greek for 'flesh-eater', after a limestone that was thought to consume the body inside.

Which civilization, centred on the palace of Knossos, is known for vibrant frescoes and marine motifs?

Minoan is a modern label, popularised by the archaeologist Arthur Evans after the mythical King Minos; what these people called themselves is unknown.

Which French artist, too ill to paint in old age, turned to scissors and coloured paper to make vivid cut-outs?

Henri Matisse, left reliant on a wheelchair by cancer surgery in 1941, cut his shapes from painted paper and came to prefer this new medium to painting itself.

Which American Regionalist painter created the iconic work 'American Gothic'?

Grant Wood painted American Gothic in 1930 after spotting a small Carpenter Gothic farmhouse with a pointed window in Eldon, Iowa.

Which Mexican muralist's 1933 fresco for New York's Rockefeller Center was destroyed because it included a portrait of Lenin?

Diego Rivera's Man at the Crossroads was destroyed in 1934, but he repainted a smaller version that year in Mexico City as Man, Controller of the Universe.

Which Japanese artist is known for polka-dot pumpkins and 'Infinity Nets' paintings?

Yayoi Kusama traced her dots to hallucinations she had as a child; in 1977 she checked herself into a Tokyo psychiatric hospital and chose to make it her permanent home.

Which American artist is famous for large flowers, New York skyscrapers and New Mexico landscapes?

Georgia O'Keeffe began painting skyscrapers after moving into Manhattan's Shelton Hotel in 1925, and made New Mexico her permanent home in 1949, three years after her husband died.

Which 1960s movement of Bridget Riley and Victor Vasarely makes flat patterns seem to move?

Op Art became a craze after The Responsive Eye, a 1965 show at New York's Museum of Modern Art; its dizzying patterns were soon copied onto dresses and adverts, to Bridget Riley's dismay.

Which 1960s New York movement pared art down to plain geometric forms?

Minimalism's makers wanted no trace of the artist's hand: Donald Judd had his boxes built by industrial fabricators, and Dan Flavin made sculptures from shop-bought fluorescent light fixtures.

Seurat's A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte hangs in which American museum?

The Art Institute of Chicago has lent the painting only once, to New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1958, where a fire forced staff to carry it out of the building.

Which artist couple wrapped Berlin's Reichstag in silvery fabric for two weeks in 1995?

Christo and Jeanne-Claude spent 24 years seeking permission and were turned down three times before a vote in the German parliament finally approved the wrapping the year before.

Leonardo left his Adoration of the Magi unfinished after departing Florence for which city in 1482?

Milan kept Leonardo for 17 years at Ludovico Sforza's court, which listed him as the duke's 'painter and engineer'; his own letter of introduction had stressed weapons and machines over art.

Dürer's 1515 woodcut shows which animal, drawn from a description without his ever seeing one?

A rhinoceros had just reached Lisbon from India, the first seen alive in Europe since Roman times; Dürer gave it plates like a suit of armour, and his version was copied for centuries.

Which Spanish cave's painted bison were long dismissed as modern forgeries?

Altamira's ceiling was first noticed in 1879 by eight-year-old María Sanz de Sautuola; her father, who published the find, was accused of forgery and died before the experts recanted.

Who modelled for the man in the painting American Gothic?

The family dentist, Byron McKeeby, posed for the man and the painter's sister Nan for the woman; the artist said they were a father and daughter, not the married couple many assumed.

Which American architect designed both Fallingwater and the spiral Guggenheim Museum in New York?

Frank Lloyd Wright made more than 700 sketches for the Guggenheim, and died in April 1959, six months before its doors opened.

Andy Warhol was born in which US city?

Pittsburgh is where Warhol, the son of working-class immigrants, was bedridden for months at eight with a nervous disease; his mother gave him his first drawing lessons while he lay ill.

Which self-taught French painter, a Paris toll collector, painted lush jungle scenes without ever leaving France?

Henri Rousseau found his jungles in Paris's botanical garden, its zoo and illustrated books, and never corrected the rumour that he had seen the tropics as a soldier in Mexico.

The 1913 Armory Show introduced Americans to which European styles?

Fauvism and Cubism reached Americans at New York's 69th Regiment Armory in February 1913, where the press had a field day ridiculing Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase.

Which sleek style of the 1920s and 30s, seen on New York's Chrysler Building, was named after a 1925 Paris exhibition?

Art Deco is short for Arts Décoratifs, from the title of the 1925 Paris exhibition; in its own day the look went by names such as 'style moderne'.

Which Baroque painter was the first woman admitted to Florence's Accademia delle Arti del Disegno?

Artemisia Gentileschi joined the Florentine academy in 1616; where most women painters of her day kept to portraits and still lifes, she took on large biblical and mythological dramas.

The Thinker was originally conceived as part of which larger work?

The Gates of Hell, a portal of scenes from Dante's Inferno commissioned in 1880, was still unfinished when its sculptor died 37 years later; The Thinker sits above the doors.

Jeff Koons's Balloon Dog sculptures are made of what?

Stainless steel, mirror-polished and tinted, lets each towering dog pass for the sort of balloon a clown twists at a party; in 2013 the orange one set an auction record for a living artist.

Banksy's work grew out of the underground scene of which English city?

Bristol's underground scene, where artists worked alongside musicians, shaped Banksy in the 1990s; in 2009 he returned to fill the city museum with more than 100 works.

The Bauhaus was founded in 1919 in which German city?

Weimar was only its first home: Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus there in 1919, and it moved to Dessau in 1925 and Berlin in 1932 before closing under Nazi pressure in 1933.

The 70-metre Bayeux Tapestry builds to a climax at which battle?

Hastings, where King Harold fell in 1066, ends the story; despite its name the Bayeux Tapestry is embroidered in wool on linen rather than woven.

The Book of Kells is held at which library?

Trinity College Dublin was given the Book of Kells in 1661; it had been sent from Kells to Dublin for safekeeping when Cromwell's cavalry was quartered in the town's church.

The bust of Queen Nefertiti, taken abroad after its 1912 discovery in Egypt, is displayed in which city?

Berlin's Neues Museum displays the bust, found by a German team led by Ludwig Borchardt; Egypt has been asking for its return since it first went on show in the 1920s.

The Bust of Nefertiti was found in the workshop of which sculptor?

Thutmose's workshop at Amarna held the bust beside unfinished portraits of the queen; it may have been the master model his sculptors copied for her official images.

The 32 Campbell's Soup Cans canvases were first exhibited in 1962 at which gallery?

Ferus Gallery, Los Angeles, showed the set in July 1962; after a few canvases sold, the gallery cancelled sales and bought all 32 from the artist for $1,000 to keep them together.

Caravaggio's extreme use of chiaroscuro came to be known as what?

Tenebrism is credited to Caravaggio, who spent his last four years moving between Naples, Malta and Sicily after fleeing Rome under a death sentence for killing a man.

Spanish cave art dated to before modern humans reached Europe is credited to which people?

Neanderthals would be the artists if the dates hold, since no modern humans lived in Europe that early; other specialists dispute the dating.

Chauvet Cave's Ice Age paintings stayed untouched until 1994 because what had sealed its entrance?

A cliff collapse buried the entrance more than 20,000 years ago, so even cave-bear paw prints survive in the soft floor; three cavers found a way in on 18 December 1994.

Dalí's Christ of Saint John of the Cross hangs in which city's Kelvingrove gallery?

Glasgow's museums director bought the painting from Dalí in 1952 together with its copyright, which has since earned back the purchase price many times over.

Claude Monet was raised in which Normandy port?

Le Havre became home when Monet's family moved there in 1845; in 1872 he painted its harbour at dawn as Impression, Sunrise, the picture that gave Impressionism its name.

Whose 1916 Dada Manifesto first set out the movement's principles?

Hugo Ball read his Dada Manifesto at the first public Dada soirée on 14 July 1916; Tzara answered with a longer manifesto in 1918 that threw out every definition of Dada.

Michelangelo's David carries what over his left shoulder?

A sling is his only weapon: earlier Florentine Davids stand over Goliath's severed head, but Michelangelo chose the tense moment before the fight.

Michelangelo's David stood in which square until 1873?

Piazza della Signoria, outside the seat of city government, held David from 1504 until it was moved indoors to protect it from damage; a replica has stood there since 1910.

Diego Rivera's 27-mural series was painted for which US city?

Detroit's art museum commissioned the frescoes with money from Edsel Ford; Rivera spent three months sketching Ford's River Rouge plant and judged the result his most successful work.

The contemporary art exhibition Documenta is held every five years in which German city?

Kassel has hosted Documenta since 1955, when Arnold Bode founded it to show Germans the modern art that the Nazis had condemned as 'degenerate'.

Donatello's David was the first freestanding what since antiquity?

Nude male sculpture in the round returned to European art with Donatello's bronze David; when the Medici were exiled in 1494, the city took it for its own town hall.

Edgar Degas is identified above all with which subject?

Dancers made Degas one of the best-known names in Impressionism, a label he rejected; unlike most of the group, he did not paint outdoors.

The blood-red sky of The Scream hangs over the fjord of which city?

Oslo, then called Kristiania, lies below the Ekeberg hill path where the painter was walking with two friends at sunset when the clouds seemed to turn to blood.

Which Austrian Expressionist died in the 1918 influenza pandemic at 28, three days after his wife?

Egon Schiele died on 31 October 1918, three days after his pregnant wife Edith; he spent the days between making sketches of her.

Lord Elgin was British ambassador to which empire when his agents removed the Parthenon sculptures?

The Ottoman Empire then ruled Athens; Elgin said its officials permitted the removals, a claim still disputed, and Parliament bought the marbles for the British Museum in 1816.

What does 'les Fauves', the name of the Fauvist painters, mean?

Les Fauves means 'the wild beasts', a jibe by critic Louis Vauxcelles at the 1905 Salon d'Automne; Henri Matisse and André Derain led the movement.

Duchamp's Fountain was submitted in 1917 to the inaugural exhibition of which group?

The Society of Independent Artists promised to show any work for a fee, yet hid Fountain, signed 'R. Mutt', at its 1917 debut exhibition.

A severe illness in the 1790s left the Spanish court painter Goya permanently what?

Deaf from then on, Goya turned to darker subjects, ending with the nightmarish Black Paintings he applied straight onto the walls of his farmhouse outside Madrid.

Fresco painting is executed on what kind of surface?

Fresco, Italian for 'fresh', is painted on wet lime plaster so the pigment binds into the wall as it dries.

Which Frida Kahlo painting sold at Sotheby's New York for $54.7 million in November 2025?

The Dream (The Bed), a 1940 self-portrait asleep beneath a papier-mâché skeleton, set an auction record for a woman artist; it had last sold in 1980 for $51,000.

Whose 1909 manifesto launched Futurism?

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti ran his manifesto on the front page of Le Figaro in February 1909; it glorified speed and violence and called for museums and libraries to be destroyed.

Besides pointillism, Seurat devised which technique?

Chromoluminarism, better known as divisionism, keeps pure colours unmixed on the canvas; Seurat took the idea from scientific colour theory, expecting brighter results than blended pigment.

Georgia O'Keeffe is known by what nickname?

'Mother of American modernism' is how Georgia O'Keeffe is often described, yet she refused to be seen as a 'woman artist' and disputed critics who read her work through her sex.

The Ghent Altarpiece is also known by what title?

Adoration of the Mystic Lamb is the title of its central panel; the altarpiece has been carried off more than once, by French troops in 1794 and by the Nazis, who hid it in an Austrian salt mine.

Which sculptor is credited with creating the Baroque style of sculpture?

Gian Lorenzo Bernini, sculptor of the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, also wrote, directed and acted in plays and designed their sets.

Which painter frescoed the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua around 1305?

Giotto painted it for the banker Enrico Scrovegni, who is thought to have built the chapel to atone for the moneylending that made his family rich.

In 2018 a framed Banksy Girl with Balloon shredded itself at what moment, via a device hidden in the frame?

Just after being sold for £1.04 million the canvas slid into a shredder hidden in the frame; renamed Love Is in the Bin, the half-shredded work resold in 2021 for £18.5 million.

Girl with a Pearl Earring belongs to the Dutch genre known as what?

Tronie means a study of a head or character type that was never meant as a portrait, so the girl in the exotic turban is an imagined figure, not a named sitter.

Girl with a Pearl Earring hangs in which museum?

Mauritshuis, The Hague, received the picture as a bequest from Arnoldus des Tombe, who had bought it, dirty and in poor condition, for two guilders at an 1881 auction.

Gothic art developed in the 12th century out of which earlier style?

Romanesque gave way to Gothic in northern France in the 12th century; the name 'Gothic' began as an insult from Renaissance writers who thought the style barbaric.

Guernica is exhibited in which Madrid museum?

Museo Reina Sofía has shown Guernica since 1992; the painting stayed out of Spain throughout Franco's rule, waiting at MoMA in New York until 1981.

Guernica is painted in which colours?

Grey, black and white only; the photographer Dora Maar, the painter's partner, recorded the canvas at each stage, so its changes over a few weeks of work can still be followed.

Which architect designed the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao?

Frank Gehry's building drew so many tourists and so much money to the city that similar landmark-led revivals are now called the 'Bilbao effect'.

Klimt was a founding member of which movement?

Vienna Secession members broke away in 1897 from the city's conservative artists' association to exhibit on their own terms, and elected Klimt their first president.

Which artist led the Realism movement in 19th-century French painting?

Gustave Courbet vowed to paint only what he could see; when the 1855 World's Fair jury turned down some of his canvases, he put up his own Pavilion of Realism next door.

The Hermitage Museum was founded in 1764 by which ruler?

Catherine the Great began the Hermitage in 1764 by buying a picture collection that the Berlin dealer Gotzkowsky had assembled for Frederick the Great, who declined to pay for it after the Seven Years' War.

Spain's royal collection brought The Garden of Earthly Delights to which museum?

Museo del Prado has housed the triptych since 1939; after the royal purchase at auction it spent centuries at the Escorial monastery outside Madrid.

Impression, Sunrise is usually displayed at which Paris museum?

Musée Marmottan Monet owes the painting to Georges de Bellio, a doctor who bought it in 1878 and whose family later gave it; thieves took it in 1985 and it was recovered in 1990.

Which critic coined 'Impressionism' in a satirical 1874 review?

Louis Leroy's mocking review, headed 'Exhibition of the Impressionists', ran in Le Charivari in April 1874; he took the word from the title of Monet's Impression, Sunrise.

Whose painting Interchange reportedly sold for $300 million in 2015?

Willem de Kooning sold Interchange for $4,000 the year he painted it; sixty years later hedge-fund manager Kenneth Griffin reportedly bought it from David Geffen's foundation.

The thieves who robbed Boston's Gardner Museum in 1990 posed as what to gain entry?

Policemen answering a disturbance call was the cover story of the two thieves, who handcuffed the guards and spent 81 minutes looting the galleries.

J.M.W. Turner entered which institution's schools at just 14?

The Royal Academy admitted Turner to its schools in 1789, and only a year later it accepted one of his watercolours for its annual exhibition.

Which artist did Jackson Pollock marry in 1945?

Lee Krasner, an abstract painter herself, took on the promotion of Pollock's career after they married in 1945 and ran his estate after his fatal crash in 1956.

Jan van Eyck was called 'the inventor of oil-painting' by which biographer?

Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists (1550) credited Jan van Eyck with inventing oil painting, a claim now considered an oversimplification.

Basquiat first found notoriety as part of which graffiti duo?

SAMO, from 'same old', was the tag Basquiat shared with Al Diaz; when the pair fell out in 1980, he wrote 'SAMO IS DEAD' on walls and turned to painting.

Besides painting, Vermeer followed his father into which trade?

An art dealer like his father Reynier, Vermeer traded pictures alongside his own slow output; his widow Catharina was left in debt at his death in 1675.

John Constable's paintings of which area are known as 'Constable Country'?

Dedham Vale, on the Essex-Suffolk border where Constable grew up, never made him rich: he sold more pictures in France than in England.

The Great Wave off Kanagawa belongs to which print series?

Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji actually runs to 46 prints: the first set sold so well that the publisher added ten more.

Keith Haring first drew attention with chalk drawings where?

New York subway stations had unused black advertising panels, and from 1980 Keith Haring filled them with quick white-chalk drawings as commuters looked on.

Leonardo's Lady with an Ermine is held in which city?

Kraków's Czartoryski Museum shows the portrait, which a Polish prince bought in Italy in 1798; the Nazis seized it in 1939 and it came home in 1946.

The Laocoön Group shows a Trojan priest and his sons attacked by what?

Sea serpents were sent by the gods, in the best-known telling because Laocoön warned Troy against the wooden horse; Michelangelo was called to see the marble as soon as it was unearthed.

Velázquez's Las Meninas depicts the court of which Spanish king?

Las Meninas (1656) shows the Infanta Margarita with her ladies-in-waiting, with Philip IV and Queen Mariana reflected in a mirror at the back.

The Lascaux caves are in which French department?

Dordogne is home to Lascaux, found near Montignac by four teenagers in 1940; it closed to visitors in 1963 because their presence was damaging the paintings.

Manet's Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe was shown at which 1863 exhibition?

The Salon des Refusés was ordered by Napoleon III after protests at the official jury's rejections; Manet hung the picture there under its first title, Le Bain.

Leonardo da Vinci trained in Florence under which master?

Andrea del Verrocchio took Leonardo into his Florentine workshop as a teenager; an early biographer's doubtful story has the master giving up painting once his pupil's angel outshone his own figures.

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon is named after a street in which Spanish city?

Barcelona's Carrer d'Avinyó, a street with a brothel, gave the title; first called The Brothel of Avignon, the picture got its politer name from the poet André Salmon in 1916.

Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People commemorates which uprising?

The July Revolution of 1830 toppled Charles X; the new government bought the painting in 1831, then took it off view because officials found its message too inflammatory.

Which French king began rebuilding the medieval Louvre as a Renaissance palace in 1546?

Francis I had already pulled down the old keep in 1528; he hired the architect Pierre Lescot in 1546 but died the following year, leaving the building to his successors.

Warhol's Marilyn Diptych is based on a still from which film?

Niagara (1953) supplied the publicity photo; Warhol turned to it shortly after Monroe's death in August 1962, repeating her face fifty times across two panels.

Mark Rothko was born in a city that is now part of which country?

Latvia now includes Daugavpils, then Dvinsk in the Russian Empire; Rothko's father left for Portland, Oregon, fearing his sons would be drafted into the tsar's army, and the family followed by 1913.

Rothko refunded a lucrative commission for murals meant for which restaurant?

The Four Seasons, in New York's Seagram Building, was to get the murals; Rothko withdrew, disgusted at decorating a room for wealthy diners, and later gave nine of the canvases to the Tate.

Which New York museum's Cloisters branch in Fort Tryon Park is devoted to medieval European art?

The Metropolitan Museum of Art opened The Cloisters in 1938 with John D. Rockefeller Jr.'s money; he also gave the clifftops across the Hudson as parkland to keep them free of further building.

The Museum of Modern Art opened in New York just nine days after what event?

The Wall Street Crash struck in late October 1929 and MoMA opened on 7 November, in six rented rooms on the twelfth floor of a Fifth Avenue office building.

The Musée d'Orsay is housed in a former what?

Railway station platforms at the Gare d'Orsay, opened in 1900, proved too short for longer trains; the building was nearly demolished for a hotel before reopening as a museum in 1986.

Whose writings during the rediscovery of Pompeii helped birth Neoclassicism in Rome?

Johann Joachim Winckelmann's writings on Greek art, notably his 1764 History of the Art of Antiquity, inspired the Neoclassicism that Grand Tour students carried home from Rome.

The Winged Victory of Samothrace stands on a base shaped like what?

A ship's bow in grey marble carries the goddess, shown at the moment she alights on deck; the monument is read as a thank-offering for a victory at sea.

Pollock's No. 5, 1948 reportedly sold in 2006 for what price?

$140 million was the price reported when David Geffen sold it privately; the financier named as the buyer then denied through his lawyers that he owned the painting.

Which painter's only lifetime solo show was shut by Paris police over its nudes?

Amedeo Modigliani's nudes could be seen from the street at Berthe Weill's gallery; police stopped the show on its opening day, and it went on only after the nudes were taken down.

The oldest known oil paintings were made by Buddhist artists in which country?

Afghanistan's Bamiyan caves hold murals from the mid-7th century painted with drying oils, possibly six centuries before oil painting took hold in Europe.

Who modelled for Manet's Olympia?

Victorine Meurent, who also posed for Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe, became a painter herself; in 1876 the Salon jury accepted her work in a year when it turned down Manet's.

Who gave the young Picasso his first formal training in drawing and oil painting?

His father, José Ruiz Blasco, a professor of drawing, trained him; by late 1901 the young painter had dropped Ruiz from his signature and kept only his mother's surname, Picasso.

Which Athenian statesman directed the building of the Parthenon, begun in 447 BC?

Pericles had the Parthenon built under the eye of the sculptor Phidias, to replace a temple the Persians had destroyed when they sacked Athens in 480 BC.

Which American sculptor's moving abstract works were dubbed 'mobiles' by Marcel Duchamp?

Alexander Calder's first moving pieces were driven by motors, and those were the ones Duchamp named; the hanging mobiles stirred only by air currents came afterwards.

Gauguin spent a privileged early childhood in which country?

Peru took in the Gauguins after his journalist father died on the voyage out; his widowed mother raised Paul for several years on a wealthy relative's estate in Lima before returning to France.

Rubens is considered the most influential artist of which tradition?

Flemish Baroque painting's leading name, Rubens ran the most famous studio in Europe and doubled as a diplomat; Charles I of England knighted him for helping to broker peace with Spain.

Murujuga, a peninsula with one of the world's densest concentrations of petroglyphs, is in which country?

Australia's Murujuga, in the Pilbara, holds more than a million rock engravings; some show thylacines, the 'Tasmanian tigers', so the pictures have outlasted the animal itself.

Renoir's son Jean became famous as what?

A filmmaker, Jean Renoir married one of his father's models and began directing in the 1920s with her as his star, going on to make La Grande Illusion and The Rules of the Game.

Bruegel the Elder joined the painters' guild of which great port in 1551?

Antwerp was home to the leading print publisher of the day, and Bruegel made his name designing prints for him before he married in 1563 and moved to Brussels.

Michelangelo's Pietà is carved from which marble?

Carrara marble from Tuscany forms the Pietà, the only work Michelangelo ever signed: he cut his name across the sash on Mary's chest.

Which two artists developed pointillism in the 1880s?

Georges Seurat and Paul Signac worked the method out together; after Seurat died in 1891, aged 31, Signac carried the movement on for decades, long leading the Société des Artistes Indépendants.

Which British artist is known for sunlit paintings of Californian swimming pools such as 'A Bigger Splash'?

David Hockney painted A Bigger Splash in California in 1967; he said he loved the idea of spending two weeks painting a splash that lasts two seconds.

Klimt's Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I is also known by what nickname?

The Lady in Gold, gleaming with gold and silver leaf, was seized by the Nazis and only returned to the sitter's niece Maria Altmann after a legal fight that reached the US Supreme Court.

Which critic organised the 1910 London exhibition 'Manet and the Post-Impressionists', popularising the term?

Roger Fry made up the word 'Post-Impressionist' to give his show at the Grafton Galleries a title, and the label has stuck to that generation of French painters ever since.

Which Spanish painter's The Third of May 1808 shows a French firing squad?

Francisco Goya painted it in 1814, having asked to 'perpetuate by means of his brush' Spain's rising against Napoleon; the light picks out one unarmed man with his arms flung wide.

Which god stands at the far left of Botticelli's Primavera, raising his staff to the clouds?

Mercury, in helmet and winged sandals, touches the clouds with his staff; at the far right the wind god Zephyrus seizes the nymph Chloris, who then turns into Flora, goddess of spring.

Raphael probably trained in the workshop of which painter?

Pietro Perugino left so deep a mark on the young Raphael that his 1504 Marriage of the Virgin reworks a painting of the same subject by the older master.

Who painted The Gleaners and The Angelus?

Jean-François Millet's Angelus so obsessed Salvador Dalí that he insisted the praying couple were mourning a child; an X-ray made at his urging showed a painted-over shape that he took for a small coffin.

Rembrandt's The Night Watch is a group portrait of what kind of organisation?

A civic militia company of Amsterdam musketeers, led by Captain Frans Banninck Cocq, ordered it for their hall; in 1715 the canvas was cut down on all four sides to fit a wall in the Town Hall.

Rembrandt was born in which Dutch university city?

Leiden kept Rembrandt until he was about 25; he then moved to Amsterdam, the booming trade capital, where wealthy merchants wanted portraits.

René Magritte, painter of men in bowler hats, was born in which country?

Belgium was home for most of Magritte's life; before a gallery contract let him paint full-time in 1926, he earned his living designing wallpaper and advertising posters.

The Rijksmuseum was originally founded in 1798 in which city?

The Rijksmuseum began in 1798 as the Nationale Kunst-Galerij in The Hague's Huis ten Bosch and moved to Amsterdam in 1808 at Louis Bonaparte's order.

Rococo emerged in France as a reaction against what?

The Louis XIV style of Versailles was heavy and formal; when the old king died in 1715 and a five-year-old inherited the throne, Paris designers turned to light, playful shell-and-scroll ornament.

The Rosetta Stone bears a decree from 196 BC on behalf of which ruler?

Ptolemy V's decree is carved three times, in hieroglyphs, Demotic and Greek; because scholars could already read the Greek, the stone gave Champollion his key to the hieroglyphs in the 1820s.

Roy Lichtenstein replicated which printing technique by hand?

Ben-Day dots, the cheap tints of comic-book printing, became his trademark, painted by hand at huge scale; in 1964 a Life magazine headline about him asked, 'Is He the Worst Artist in the U.S.?'

Which body staged the first Paris Salon in 1667?

The Académie Royale, the crown's official body of painters and sculptors, alone could show there at first; a jury chose the works from 1748, and only the French Revolution opened the Salon to outsiders.

Which genre ranked first in the Salon's academic hierarchy?

History scenes ranked first because academies prized the human figure in noble action, the painted equal of epic or tragedy; still lifes, showing only lifeless objects, came last.

Salvador Dalí was born in which Catalan town?

Figueres also holds his last great project: Dalí turned the ruins of the town's old theatre into his own museum, and he lies buried in a crypt inside it.

The Salvator Mundi attributed to Leonardo shows Christ holding what in his left hand?

A crystal orb marks Christ as saviour of the world; the panel sold for just £45 in 1958 as the work of a follower, then for about $450 million at Christie's in 2017.

Which group revived Botticelli's reputation in the late 19th century?

The Pre-Raphaelites prized the crisp line of painters who worked before Raphael, and their enthusiasm lifted Botticelli out of centuries of neglect.

Which object is stretched out of shape across the floor of Holbein's The Ambassadors, readable only from one side?

A skull snaps into shape when the picture is seen from a sharp angle: among the two men's finery and instruments, death is in plain view yet hidden until you find it.

Which pope commissioned Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling?

Julius II commissioned the ceiling, but the chapel carries another pope's name: Sixtus IV had it built some thirty years earlier, and 'Sistine' simply means 'of Sixtus'.

Van Gogh's second Sunflowers series was painted in which town in 1888?

Arles is where Van Gogh painted them in 1888 to decorate the room Gauguin would use in the Yellow House; Gauguin thought the sunflowers 'completely Vincent'.

Tate Modern occupies a former what?

Power station turbines once filled its vast entrance hall; the Tate chose the disused Bankside plant in the 1990s, and architects Herzog & de Meuron kept the giant hall when they converted it.

Tempera, the standard panel-painting medium before oils, uses what as its binder?

Egg yolk makes a paint that dries almost at once, so colours cannot be blended on the panel; painters built up their shading from fine cross-hatched strokes instead.

The Terracotta Army was discovered in 1974 by whom?

Local farmers digging a well near Xi'an in March 1974 struck the first pit; estimates put the army at over 8,000 soldiers.

Holbein's The Ambassadors features a lute with what telling detail?

The lute's broken string symbolises discord, lying beside a Lutheran hymnal open at Luther's hymns, a nod to Europe's religious split in 1533.

The Arnolfini Portrait hangs in which museum?

The National Gallery in London bought it in 1842 from James Hay, a Scottish soldier who had served in Spain, where it hung in the royal collection; how he came by it is still unknown.

Which Sistine Chapel ceiling fresco shows two outstretched index fingers that almost touch?

The Creation of Adam is the fourth of the ceiling's Genesis scenes; in 1990 a physician argued that the cloak and figures around God trace the outline of a human brain.

When closed, the outer panels of The Garden of Earthly Delights show what scene?

The Third Day of Creation is the usual reading because the grey globe has plants but no animals or people yet; God sits small in the upper left corner.

Which imported synthetic blue pigment transformed Japanese woodblock prints such as The Great Wave?

Prussian blue reached Japan from Europe within the printmaker's lifetime; it gave prints a far wider range of deep blues than the plant dyes used before, which faded quickly.

Under what title was Klimt's The Kiss exhibited in 1908?

Liebespaar (The Lovers) was its title at the 1908 Kunstschau, the exhibition Klimt helped to organise, and the state bought it straight from the show; it hangs in the Belvedere.

Leonardo's Last Supper covers a refectory wall of which convent?

Santa Maria delle Grazie's friars ate beneath it: Duke Ludovico Sforza commissioned the scene for the convent's dining hall in the 1490s.

What is misleading about the title of Rembrandt's The Night Watch?

It is not a nocturnal scene: thick, darkened varnish made a daylit picture look like a night patrol, and the nickname stuck.

Who painted The Raft of the Medusa?

Théodore Géricault interviewed survivors of the 1816 wreck, built a model of the raft and sketched corpses and severed limbs so that the dying would look real.

In Raphael's School of Athens, which figure is believed to be a portrait of Michelangelo?

Heraclitus, brooding alone against a block of marble, is widely taken as Raphael's portrait of his great rival Michelangelo; Plato is thought to have Leonardo's face.

The painter of The Scream wrote that, at a blood-red sunset, he sensed an 'infinite scream' passing through what?

Nature was the screamer in his account: out walking at sunset, he saw the sky turn red as blood and stood trembling at the fence while his two friends walked on.

What obscures the face in Magritte's The Son of Man?

A green apple hides the face on purpose: Magritte said that everything we see hides another thing, and that we always want to see what is hidden by what we see.

The Starry Night shows the view from its painter's window at what kind of place?

An asylum near Saint-Rémy, where the artist spent a year from 1889; he painted the canvas by day, and the village under the stars could not be seen from his window at all.

Which object did Magritte paint above a caption saying it is not one?

A pipe: 'Ceci n'est pas une pipe', says the caption, and it is right, since nobody could fill or smoke a painted one; the canvas hangs in Los Angeles.

Kahlo painted The Two Fridas in 1939, the year she did what?

Kahlo divorced Diego Rivera in 1939 and painted the picture out of that pain; the pair remarried only a year later.

Titian was the leading painter of which Renaissance school?

Venetian painting's leading master, Titian so impressed Emperor Charles V with a portrait painted in Bologna that the emperor made him a Count Palatine.

Which 16th-century painter built portrait heads entirely out of fruit, vegetables and flowers?

Giuseppe Arcimboldo was a favourite court painter of the Habsburg emperors, and even portrayed Emperor Rudolf II as Vertumnus, the Roman god of the seasons, made of fruit and vegetables.

Forger Han van Meegeren sold a fake Dutch Old Master to which Nazi leader during the Second World War?

Hermann Göring's prize was traced to van Meegeren after the war; charged with collaborating with the Nazis, he answered by confessing that he had painted it himself.

What does ukiyo-e translate as?

Pictures of the floating world began as a pun: 'ukiyo' was a Buddhist word for this sorrowful, fleeting life, which Edo's pleasure-seekers turned into a 'floating world' to be enjoyed.

Hiroshige is best known for which horizontal landscape series?

Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō follows the old highway from Edo to Kyoto, one print for each post town; in Europe, avant-garde painters in France were among the first to admire his landscapes.

Vanitas painting was a sub-genre heavily used by painters of which country during the Baroque?

The Netherlands made vanitas a speciality in the 1600s: its emblems of death and passing time stood for the vanity of earthly pleasures, after the 'vanity of vanities' of Ecclesiastes.

Which Italian city has hosted a famous international art Biennale since 1895?

Venice held its first International Art Exhibition in 1895; the Biennale later branched into music, theatre and cinema, and its 1932 film festival was the first of its kind anywhere.

A farmer on which Greek island unearthed a famous armless marble Venus in 1820?

Milos gave the Venus de Milo her name; dug up in pieces by a farmer, she was presented to King Louis XVIII of France and went on show in Paris the following year.

The Venus of Willendorf is about how tall?

11 centimetres is all she stands, small enough to carry: a 2022 study matched her limestone to rock near Lake Garda in northern Italy, far across the Alps from the Austrian village where she was found.

Which relative paid Van Gogh's way throughout his ten-year painting career?

His brother Theo supported him for his entire career, since the paintings barely sold; much of what we know about the artist comes from the letters he wrote to Theo.

Leonardo's drawing of a man within a circle and square illustrates which Roman architect's proportions?

Vitruvius wrote that a temple's parts should relate as harmoniously as those of the human body, which he said fits both a circle and a square; Leonardo tested the idea on paper around 1490.

Which abstract pioneer titled paintings 'Composition' and 'Improvisation'?

Wassily Kandinsky studied law and economics in Moscow and turned to painting only at 30, moving to Munich to train; he wrote that colour is the keyboard and the soul the piano.

Which Paris museum has oval Water Lilies rooms?

Musée de l'Orangerie had the two oval rooms built for the murals, which their painter gave to France after the First World War, encouraged by his friend, the statesman Georges Clemenceau.

What is the formal title of Whistler's Mother?

Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1 was his way of saying the sitter was beside the point: what, he asked, should the public care about 'the identity of the portrait'? France bought it in 1891.

Which Victorian critic did the painter Whistler sue for libel over a scathing review, winning a single farthing?

John Ruskin had savaged Whistler's Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket; the painter won his case but only a farthing in damages, and the legal costs helped to bankrupt him the following year.

Manet turned to painting only after failing the entrance exam for which career?

Naval officer was the compromise: his father, a judge, wanted him in law, and Manet agreed to try for the navy instead; only when he failed its entrance exam was he allowed to study art.

Which Post-Impressionist is Picasso said to have called 'the father of us all'?

Paul Cézanne entered law school to please his banker father, then persuaded him to pay for art studies in Paris instead.

Which crusading French king first built the Louvre as a fortress around 1190?

Philip II Augustus built it to protect Paris before he left on the Third Crusade; remains of the medieval walls can still be seen in the museum's basement.

Kazimir Malevich's 1915 Black Square launched which art movement?

Black Square launched Suprematism, Malevich's art of pure geometric feeling; the first of four versions hung high in a corner, icon-style, at the 0,10 exhibition in 1915.

On which island was El Greco born?

Crete was his birthplace in 1541; Doménikos Theotokópoulos left for Italy and then Toledo, picking up abroad the nickname that simply means 'the Greek'.

In which London museum does Fragonard's Rococo masterpiece The Swing hang?

The Wallace Collection's picture was a private commission: it shows a nobleman's mistress on the swing while a man hides in the bushes below, placed just where he can look up her skirts.

Andrew Wyeth's 1948 Christina's World was inspired by seeing its subject doing what?

Wyeth saw Anna Christina Olson crawling across a field from a window; she had a degenerative muscular disorder and refused a wheelchair. MoMA bought the tempera in 1949.

What animal floats in formalin in Damien Hirst's 1991 'Physical Impossibility of Death' piece?

A tiger shark floats in the tank; the collector Charles Saatchi paid for the piece in 1991, and when the original began to decay it was replaced with a fresh shark in 2006.

For how much did Edward Hopper sell Nighthawks in 1942, within months of finishing it?

$3,000 bought Nighthawks within months of its completion; the woman at the counter was modelled by his wife Jo, who posed for nearly every woman he painted.

Which French painter's Woman with a Hat, a wildly coloured portrait of his wife, caused a scandal in 1905?

Henri Matisse sold it to the American siblings Gertrude and Leo Stein for 500 francs, a boost to his morale after the harsh early criticism.

Painter Aaron Douglas and sculptor Augusta Savage were leading lights of which 1920s flowering of Black culture?

The Harlem Renaissance was known at the time as the New Negro Movement, after a 1925 anthology edited by the philosopher Alain Locke.

Which type of painting ranked lowest in the French Academy's hierarchy, below even landscapes and animal pictures?

Still life came last in the ranking set out by the theorist André Félibien, who wrote that painting living animals was worth more than showing only dead things without movement.

Which French term names the practice made far easier by the invention of the paint tube in 1841?

En plein air, or outdoor, painting owes a debt to the American portraitist John G. Rand, whose tin tube let oil paint be stored and carried without drying out.

Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin rose to fame in which loose group that began with the 1988 student show Freeze?

Young British Artists owed their break to adman Charles Saatchi, who visited Freeze, a show Hirst organised while still a second-year student at Goldsmiths.

Which British movement, inspired by designer William Morris, blamed factory production for a decline in standards?

Arts and Crafts reformers prized handwork over the machine; Morris himself turned out over 600 designs for wallpaper, textiles and embroidery.

Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty, a 1,500-foot coil of basalt built in 1970 as land art, lies in which US state?

Utah's Great Salt Lake swallowed the jetty in 1972, two years after it was built, and only sustained drought in the early 2000s brought it back into view.

Parmigianino's Madonna with the Long Neck typifies which 16th-century style of stretched limbs and twisting poses?

Mannerism prized elegance over realism: Parmigianino began this swan-necked Virgin in 1534 and it was still incomplete when he died in 1540.

Which Dutch movement, founded in 1917 by Theo van Doesburg, limited itself to straight lines and primary colours?

De Stijl means simply 'The Style', and its rules reached beyond the canvas into the Rietveld Schröder House and the Red and Blue Chair.

Which Italian movement, named by critic Germano Celant in 1967, made art from soil, rags and neon?

Arte Povera literally means 'poor art'; it flourished above all in Turin, where Mario Merz built igloos from metal, glass, earth and neon.

The word Renaissance, popularised by French historian Jules Michelet in 1855, literally means what?

Rebirth is the literal sense of the French word, though Michelet himself saw the period more as a leap in science than in art and culture.

Which Manhattan skyscraper of 1930, crowned with a gleaming metal spire, is regarded as a paragon of Art Deco?

The Chrysler Building's spire was secretly built inside the frame, then raised in 90 minutes to snatch the title of world's tallest building from a rival tower downtown.

Which idealised style became the only approved method for Soviet artists after a writers' congress in 1934?

Socialist realism stayed the Soviet Union's officially approved art for more than fifty years after Stalin's envoy Andrei Zhdanov endorsed it at the congress.

Thomas Cole's views of the Catskill Mountains launched which group of American landscape painters?

Hudson River School founder Thomas Cole took a steamboat up the river in the autumn of 1825, then hiked high into the eastern Catskills to paint.

Joseph Kosuth's One and Three Chairs, a chair beside its photo and dictionary definition, belongs to which movement?

Conceptual art holds that the idea matters more than the object; as Sol LeWitt put it, 'the idea becomes a machine that makes the art'.

What do art historians call pictures of ordinary people at everyday tasks, such as Vermeer's The Milkmaid?

Genre painting, also called petit genre, kept specialists such as Pieter de Hooch and Jacob Jordaens busy across the Low Countries in the 1600s.

Robert Henri led which group of early-1900s realists, nicknamed for gritty paintings of New York's poorer districts?

The Ashcan School owes its label to a 1916 jibe about 'ash can art'; its painters were amused, and the name soon lost its sting.

Which Munich group led by Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc shared its name with an almanac they published in 1912?

Der Blaue Reiter, 'The Blue Rider', lasted only three years: it disbanded when the First World War broke out, and Marc was killed at Verdun in 1916.

Which Italian painter of empty arcaded piazzas and long shadows founded the scuola metafisica?

Giorgio de Chirico called the Roman arcade 'fate', and his eerie squares so moved René Magritte that he said his eyes 'saw thought for the first time'.

Which British avant-garde movement did Wyndham Lewis launch in 1914 with a manifesto in the magazine Blast?

Vorticism had terrible timing: Blast was launched at a riotous dinner in July 1914, and the following month Britain was at war with Germany.

The Parthenon's inner chamber was designed to hold a colossal gold-and-ivory statue of which Greek goddess?

Athena stood helmeted with shield and spear, a two-metre Nike in her right hand, the whole statue probably built around a core of cypress wood.

Rome's bronze Capitoline Wolf suckles which legendary twins, added to the statue only in the late 15th century?

Romulus and Remus were probably added around 1471, and 21st-century radiocarbon tests suggest the she-wolf itself may be medieval rather than Etruscan.

Almost 2,000 years on, Rome's Pantheon still has the world's largest unreinforced dome made of which material?

Concrete made the span possible: the dome thins from 6.4 metres at its base to 1.2 metres around the oculus, a nine-metre opening to the sky.

Which conqueror charges at the Persian king Darius III in a floor mosaic from Pompeii's House of the Faun?

Alexander the Great keeps his gaze fixed on Darius across the battle; the floor was rediscovered in 1831 and moved to Naples twelve years later.

Reconstructions first exhibited in Munich in 2003 showed that white Greek marble statues were originally what?

Brightly painted was the ancient norm: the show, originally titled Bunte Götter, set coloured copies beside bare originals and has toured cities worldwide.

In Pliny the Elder's telling, the Greek painter Zeuxis painted which fruit so well that birds tried to peck it?

Grapes won Zeuxis the birds but not the contest: his rival Parrhasius then fooled Zeuxis himself with a painted curtain.

A relief inside Rome's Arch of Titus shows which sacred object among the spoils taken from the Temple in Jerusalem?

The golden menorah carved here became a symbol of the Jewish diaspora and the model for the emblem of the State of Israel.

The south metopes of the Parthenon show Lapith warriors locked in combat with which hybrid creatures of Greek myth?

Centaurs are shown trampling and strangling Lapiths on this side; the temple's other three sides show Amazons, giants and the fall of Troy.

The Colossus of Rhodes, a Wonder of the Ancient World felled by an earthquake in 226 BC, depicted which Greek god?

Helios was the Rhodians' patron god; they paid for his statue by selling the siege equipment a beaten enemy left behind for 300 talents.

The capital of a Corinthian column, the most ornate of the Greek orders, is carved with the leaves of which plant?

Acanthus leaves, in the Roman telling, caught the sculptor Callimachus's eye as they grew around a basket left on a young girl's grave.

Which emperor's 113 AD column in Rome carries a 190-metre spiral frieze of his wars against the Dacians?

Trajan no longer tops his own monument: in 1587 Pope Sixtus V crowned the column with a bronze Saint Peter, which is still there.

Which Greek sculptor made the 12-metre seated statue of Zeus that ranked among the Wonders of the Ancient World?

Phidias left a calling card: excavators who rediscovered his workshop in the 1950s found a cup inscribed 'I belong to Phidias'.

What are the six sculpted maidens that serve as columns on a porch of the Erechtheion in Athens called?

Caryatids number only five in Athens today: Lord Elgin removed the sixth in the early 1800s, and replicas now stand in for them on the temple.

Which large Greek ceramic vessel was filled with olive oil and given as the prize at the Panathenaic Games?

Amphora prizes were inscribed 'one of the prizes from Athens', and only an estimated 0.5 to 1 per cent of those awarded still survive.

Which emperor's bronze equestrian statue in Rome escaped the furnace because he was mistaken for Constantine?

Marcus Aurelius was spared by the mix-up with a Christian emperor, while more than 20 other bronze equestrian statues were melted down.

Which Athenian vase technique of the late 6th century BC leaves figures the colour of the clay on a black background?

Red-figure painting is usually credited to the Andokides Painter, whose 'bilingual' vases show the old style on one side and the new on the other.

The Riace bronzes, two full-size Greek warrior statues, were found in the sea in 1972 off which country?

Italy keeps the pair in Reggio Calabria; a diver out fishing spotted a dark shoulder poking from the sand a few hundred metres from shore.

The mummy portraits of Roman Egypt's Fayum were often painted in encaustic, a technique that binds pigment in what?

Hot beeswax gives the portraits rich colour and bold brushstrokes; painted on wooden boards, they are the oldest encaustic panel paintings to survive.

The Portland Vase, smashed in the British Museum by a drunken visitor in 1845, is a Roman masterpiece of what?

Cameo glass in blue and white made the vase famous; the British Museum's restorer John Doubleday pieced it back together later in 1845.

The Hellenistic bronze Boxer at Rest, dug up in Rome in 1885, has bleeding cuts and scars inlaid in which metal?

Copper inlays pick out the boxer's lips, wounds and scars, and more of them show blood trickling down his right shoulder, forearm and thigh.

Which French painter, five feet tall after breaking both legs in his teens, made posters for the Moulin Rouge?

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec walked with a cane that he hollowed out and kept filled with liquor; his first Moulin Rouge poster, starring the dancer La Goulue, appeared in 1891.

Which French sculptor designed the Statue of Liberty after Egypt rejected his giant lighthouse for the Suez Canal?

Auguste Bartholdi's rejected lighthouse was likewise a massive draped form holding a torch; in France it was rumoured that Liberty's face was modelled on his mother.

Which French painter showed Napoleon crossing the Alps on a rearing horse, though he really went by mule?

Jacques-Louis David had to work without his subject: Bonaparte refused point blank to sit, saying the picture should show his character rather than his looks.

Which painter of mothers and children was the only American officially associated with the French Impressionists?

Mary Cassatt was invited to join by Edgar Degas, whose pastels had stopped her short when she saw them in a shop window in 1875.

Which German painter's Wanderer above the Sea of Fog shows a man on a rocky precipice with his back turned?

Caspar David Friedrich turned so many figures away from the viewer that the device has a name, Rückenfigur, and this 1818 hiker is perhaps its most famous example.

Which English painter had Elizabeth Siddal lie clothed in a full bathtub as his model for the drowning Ophelia?

John Everett Millais let the oil lamps warming the tub go out; Siddal caught a severe cold, and her father sent him a demand for £50 in medical expenses.

Which 1863 exhibition, sanctioned by Napoleon III after artists protested, first showed Manet's Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe?

The Salon des Refusés also hung Whistler's Symphony in White, No. 1; that year the official jury had turned away 2,217 of more than 5,000 paintings.

Which critic did James McNeill Whistler sue for accusing him of 'flinging a pot of paint in the public's face'?

John Ruskin lost the libel case of 1878, but the jury awarded the painter just a farthing in damages, and the court costs were split.

Which French painter of The Horse Fair needed police permission in the 1850s to wear trousers to livestock markets?

Rosa Bonheur's canvas was shown privately to Queen Victoria on its English tour, and in 1865 Empress Eugénie decorated her with the Legion of Honour.

Which Ingres nude, finished in 1814 for Napoleon's sister Caroline Murat, has a back five vertebrae too long?

Grande Odalisque drew early jibes about 'two or three vertebrae too many'; a later study put the surplus at five, spread through the pelvis and lower back.