60 Fun Facts About Arts and Literature

Leonardo painted the Mona Lisa on what, rather than canvas?

A poplar panel. The wood has warped over five centuries and cracked from its top edge; restorers braced the back, and it now sits in a climate-controlled case.

The Mona Lisa's thief was arrested in 1913 in which city, where Leonardo had trained?

Florence. The thief, former Louvre workman Vincenzo Peruggia, had hidden it in a trunk in his Paris lodgings for two years; police had even treated Pablo Picasso as a suspect.

The Starry Night depicts the view from Van Gogh's window at what kind of institution?

An asylum. Van Gogh had admitted himself after cutting off part of his ear; he invented the village in the view, and later dismissed the painting as a failure.

Which Vermeer painting is a 'tronie', a study of a type of character rather than a portrait?

Girl with a Pearl Earring. In 1881 a collector bought it at a Hague auction for two guilders and thirty cents, then left it to the Mauritshuis in his will.

Thieves took Munch's The Scream on the opening day of which 1994 event?

Winter Olympics. As the Games opened in Lillehammer, two men broke into Oslo's National Gallery, took the painting in under a minute and left a note: 'Thanks for the poor security.'

Which eruption may lie behind The Scream's blood-red sky?

Krakatoa. Astronomers found that its 1883 ash turned twilights red across Europe for months, a decade before Munch painted the sky, though other scholars credit rare clouds or his own anguish.

Picasso's Guernica responded to the bombing of a town in which region of Spain?

The Basque Country. Picasso would not let Guernica enter Spain until democracy returned, so it hung at New York's MoMA and reached Madrid only in 1981, after his death.

Dalí's The Persistence of Memory is famous for which image?

The soft melting pocket watch. By Dalí's own account the idea came from a soft Camembert cheese, and the canvas is tiny: about 24 by 33 centimetres.

Michelangelo carved David for the roofline of which building?

The Duomo. Once the statue was finished, the city stood it outside the town hall instead; a copy holds that spot today, and the original is indoors at the Accademia.

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

The Gates of Hell. The doors were ordered in 1880 for a Paris museum that was never built, and Rodin first called the seated figure above them The Poet.

Which pope commissioned Michelangelo to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling?

Julius II. He first hired Michelangelo to carve his tomb, then set that project aside and prevailed on the reluctant sculptor to paint the ceiling instead.

Leonardo's Last Supper is painted on the wall of what kind of room?

A refectory. In 1652 a doorway was cut through the wall, removing Christ's feet, and in 1796 French troops used the room as a stable.

Frida Kahlo's family home, now her museum, is known by what name?

La Casa Azul. Kahlo was born and died in the cobalt-blue house, and her husband Diego Rivera had it turned into a museum, which opened four years after her death.

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

Bristol. He returned in 2009 to take over the city's museum with more than 100 works, including a huge painting of Parliament with chimpanzees in place of the MPs.

Andy Warhol was born to immigrant parents in which city?

Pittsburgh. Born Andrew Warhola, he left for New York after art school in 1949, dropped the final 'a' and spent the 1950s as an award-winning commercial illustrator.

Jackson Pollock is famous for what painting method?

The drip technique. Pollock laid his canvases on the floor and poured house paint from sticks, and in 1949 Life magazine asked its readers if he was America's greatest living painter.

The term Impressionism comes from the title of a painting by whom?

Claude Monet. A critic mocked his Impression, Sunrise as a mere sketch and titled his review 'The Exhibition of the Impressionists'; the painters adopted the insult as their name.

Van Gogh painted which flowers to decorate Gauguin's bedroom in Arles?

Sunflowers. Gauguin called them 'completely Vincent', but the visit ended after two months with a quarrel, on the night Van Gogh cut off part of his own ear.

Which Jane Austen novel, published in 1813, follows Elizabeth Bennet?

Pride and Prejudice. Austen first called it First Impressions, and when her father offered that version to a London publisher in 1797 the offer was declined.

Don Quixote charges at what, believing them to be giants?

Windmills. He takes thirty or forty of them for giants and charges with his lance, the scene behind the English phrase 'tilting at windmills' for fighting imaginary enemies.

Who is Don Quixote's squire?

Sancho Panza. The farm labourer signs on after Quixote promises him an island to govern, and in Part Two a duke plays along by giving him a village to rule.

Tolstoy's War and Peace is set during which conflict?

The Napoleonic Wars. Tolstoy revised the huge novel again and again, and his wife Sofya copied out several complete drafts by hand.

What is the name of Captain Ahab's ship in Moby-Dick?

Pequod. Her end echoes the Essex, a real whaleship rammed and sunk by a sperm whale in 1820; only eight of her twenty crew survived, some by eating their dead shipmates.

Who narrates Moby-Dick as the only survivor of Captain Ahab's last voyage?

Ishmael. He floats for a day and a night on the coffin his friend Queequeg had ordered for himself, until a passing whaler picks him up.

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

Airstrip One. The pound has gone too: Winston pays in dollars, and when an old man asks for a pint the barman says he serves only litres and half-litres.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston works at the Ministry of what?

Truth. Its work is the opposite of its name: Winston spends his days there rewriting old newspaper articles so the record always matches what the Party says now.

To Kill a Mockingbird won which award a year after its 1960 publication?

The Pulitzer. Harper Lee then published no other novel for 55 years, until Go Set a Watchman, written before Mockingbird, appeared in 2015.

Who narrates The Great Gatsby?

Nick Carraway. The novel he narrates sold so slowly that copies of its second printing were still unsold when Fitzgerald died in 1940, and it became a classic only afterwards.

Which is Shakespeare's longest play?

Hamlet. Kenneth Branagh's 1996 film was the first to keep every line of the play, and it runs about four hours.

Which playhouse burned down during Shakespeare's Henry VIII?

The Globe. A stage cannon set its thatched roof alight in 1613, and the actors themselves paid to rebuild it within a year.

James Joyce wrote Ulysses in Trieste, Zurich and Paris, but set its single day in which city?

Dublin. Joyce set the novel on 16 June 1904 because that was the day of his first outing with Nora Barnacle, his future wife, and fans now celebrate it as Bloomsday.

One Hundred Years of Solitude follows which family?

The novel has been translated into 46 languages and sold over 50 million copies.

Agatha Christie's first novel introduced which detective?

Hercule Poirot. Christie wrote the book on a dare from her sister Madge and modelled her detective on the Belgian refugees who had settled in her home town of Torquay.

Which Agatha Christie play, opened in 1952, became the world's longest-running?

The Mousetrap. Christie gave the rights to her grandson Mathew for his ninth birthday, and by her own account his present turned out the big money-winner.

Charles Dickens left school at 12 to work where?

A boot-blacking factory. He earned six shillings a week pasting labels on pots of polish, and the shame ran so deep that he told only his wife and his closest friend.

Which Dickens character's arrival turned The Pickwick Papers into a publishing phenomenon?

Sam Weller. Before Mr Pickwick's cockney servant appeared, the monthly parts ran to only about 1,000 copies; by the end the figure was 40,000.

Which Trojan War episode comes after the Iliad ends?

The wooden horse. The Iliad stops at Hector's funeral with Troy still standing, so the war's most famous trick is told only in later poems such as the Odyssey.

Who guides Dante through the Inferno and most of Purgatorio?

Virgil. He stands for human reason, so at the summit of Purgatory he can take Dante no further, and Beatrice leads the way through Paradise.

Dante's Divine Comedy helped establish which dialect as standard Italian?

Tuscan. Dante wrote the poem in his own everyday speech rather than Latin, which opened it to readers who knew no Latin, and that speech became the model for written Italian.

Beowulf the Geat comes to the aid of Hrothgar, king of which people?

The Danes. Beowulf refuses to use a weapon against the monster Grendel and grips him so hard that he escapes only by leaving his arm behind.

Beowulf's last battle is against what?

A dragon. After fifty years as king he fights it with only one young kinsman, Wiglaf, standing by him, and dies of his wounds once it is dead.

Chaucer's pilgrims in The Canterbury Tales are travelling to whose shrine?

Thomas Becket's. To pass the miles, the pilgrims agree to a storytelling contest whose winner will be treated to a supper paid for by all the rest.

Which English seaside town does Dracula plague after leaving Transylvania?

Whitby. Bram Stoker holidayed there in 1890, and it was in the town's public library that he came across the name Dracula in an old book about Wallachia.

Which Rushdie novel was voted the best Booker winner in 2008?

Midnight's Children. Rushdie wrote it while working as an advertising copywriter in London, where he also came up with the cream-cake slogan 'Naughty but nice'.

Which university administers the journalism and arts prizes that a newspaper publisher's will set up in 1917?

Columbia. The publisher who endowed the prizes also left the money that founded its journalism school, which opened in 1912, the year after he died.

Who was the first Black woman awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature?

Toni Morrison. She built her best-known novel, Beloved, on an 1856 newspaper report about Margaret Garner, a woman who had escaped slavery in Kentucky.

Warhol's studio, where he survived an assassination attempt in 1968, was called what?

The Factory. His attacker, Valerie Solanas, had appeared in one of his films, and his injuries left him wearing a surgical corset for the rest of his life.

Which Japanese artist made the woodblock print The Great Wave off Kanagawa?

Hokusai. The print comes from his Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, a series that, with its ten supplementary prints, in fact runs to forty-six.

Who is the narrator and teenage rebel at the centre of The Catcher in the Rye?

Holden Caulfield. Salinger turned down every offer to put him on stage or screen, including approaches from the Hollywood producer Samuel Goldwyn and the director Elia Kazan.

Which impoverished former law student murders a pawnbroker in Crime and Punishment?

Rodion Raskolnikov. He kills to test his theory that extraordinary men stand above ordinary morality, then confesses and is sent to Siberia, where Sonya follows him.

Botticelli's The Birth of Venus hangs in which gallery?

The Uffizi. The building began as offices for the city's magistrates, and an 18th-century Medici bequest laid down that the family's art must never leave the city.

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein carries which subtitle?

The Modern Prometheus. The story began as her entry in a ghost-story contest that Lord Byron proposed during a cold, stormy summer in Switzerland in 1816.

The Carpenter Gothic house behind Grant Wood's American Gothic stands in which state?

Iowa. Wood spotted the little house in the town of Eldon, then had his sister Nan and his dentist pose separately as the kind of people he imagined living there.

Which Brave New World character grew up reading a volume of Shakespeare?

John the Savage. Raised on a reservation outside the World State, he speaks in Shakespeare's lines, and one of them, from The Tempest, gives the novel its title.

In which Vienna palace museum does Klimt's The Kiss hang?

The Belvedere. The state bought the painting for the gallery straight from its first exhibition in 1908, at a high price, before Klimt had even finished it.

Which Paris museum holds Whistler's Mother, bought by the French state in 1891?

The Musée d'Orsay has held it since 1986, after decades in the Louvre. Whistler called it Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1 because he wanted viewers to see a harmony of tones, not a portrait.

William Golding wrote Lord of the Flies as a realistic answer to which children's adventure novel?

The Coral Island shows three shipwrecked boys living in harmony; Golding turned it inside out, borrowed its heroes' names Ralph and Jack, and has a naval officer name the book in his final scene.

Which French painter showed the survivors of an 1816 shipwreck in The Raft of the Medusa?

Théodore Géricault painted the 15 people still alive when rescue came; about 150 had boarded the raft, which the frigate's boats were meant to tow to shore but cut loose.

Rembrandt's The Night Watch, a 1642 group portrait of a militia company, hangs where?

The Rijksmuseum displays it as its best-known work. Rembrandt broke with static group portraits by showing the militia moving out, as Captain Frans Banninck Cocq orders his lieutenant to march.

Whose gold-leaf portrait by Klimt, looted by the Nazis and returned in 2006, inspired the film Woman in Gold?

Adele Bloch-Bauer's niece Maria Altmann took Austria to the US Supreme Court to win the looted portrait back, then sold it to Ronald Lauder for $135 million.