Arts and Literature Trivia
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60 free Arts and Literature trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
48 free arts and literature trivia questions with answers. The classic Trivial Pursuit brown wedge, rebuilt with sources. This arts and literature quiz splits its time between the gallery and the library: the Mona Lisa's theft, the asylum window behind The Starry Night, Michelangelo's David and ceiling, Rodin's Thinker, Warhol's Factory and Banksy's Bristol roots on one side; Don Quixote, Moby-Dick, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Ulysses, Hamlet, the Iliad, the Divine Comedy, Beowulf and The Canterbury Tales on the other, plus the prizes that crown them. The easy questions ask who painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling and who wrote Pride and Prejudice. The hard ones want the Dutch word for a painting like Girl with a Pearl Earring, the year Munch's Scream was created, the whaleship whose sinking ended Moby-Dick, the day on which all of Ulysses takes place and the first winner of the Booker Prize. Built for pub quizzes, book clubs, museum trips and anyone who wants the brown wedge every time. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the works, artists and authors, and each question carries the sentence that backs it up.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Leonardo painted the Mona Lisa on what, rather than canvas?
A poplar panel
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.
Q 02The Mona Lisa's thief was arrested in 1913 in which city, where Leonardo had trained?
Florence
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.
Q 03The Starry Night depicts the view from Van Gogh's window at what kind of institution?
An asylum
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.
Q 04Which Vermeer painting is a 'tronie', a study of a type of character rather than a portrait?
Girl with a Pearl Earring
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.
Q 05Thieves took Munch's The Scream on the opening day of which 1994 event?
Winter Olympics
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.'
Q 06Which eruption may lie behind The Scream's blood-red sky?
Krakatoa
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.
Q 07Picasso's Guernica responded to the bombing of a town in which region of Spain?
The Basque Country
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.
Q 08Dalí's The Persistence of Memory is famous for which image?
The soft melting pocket watch
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.
Q 09Michelangelo carved David for the roofline of which building?
The Duomo
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.
Q 10Rodin's The Thinker was originally conceived as part of which larger work?
The Gates of Hell
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.
Q 11Which pope commissioned Michelangelo to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling?
Julius II
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.
Q 12Leonardo's Last Supper is painted on the wall of what kind of room?
A refectory
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.
Q 13Frida Kahlo's family home, now her museum, is known by what name?
La Casa Azul
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.
Q 21Who is Don Quixote's squire?
Sancho Panza
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.
Q 22Tolstoy's War and Peace is set during which conflict?
The Napoleonic Wars
The Napoleonic Wars. Tolstoy revised the huge novel again and again, and his wife Sofya copied out several complete drafts by hand.
Q 23What is the name of Captain Ahab's ship in Moby-Dick?
Pequod
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.
Q 14Banksy's work grew out of the underground scene in which English city?
Bristol
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.
Q 15Andy Warhol was born to immigrant parents in which city?
Pittsburgh
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.
Q 16Jackson Pollock is famous for what painting method?
The drip technique
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.
Q 17The term Impressionism comes from the title of a painting by whom?
Claude Monet
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.
Q 18Van Gogh painted which flowers to decorate Gauguin's bedroom in Arles?
Sunflowers
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.
Q 19Which Jane Austen novel, published in 1813, follows Elizabeth Bennet?
Pride and Prejudice
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.
Q 20Don Quixote charges at what, believing them to be giants?
Windmills
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.
Q 24Who narrates Moby-Dick as the only survivor of Captain Ahab's last voyage?
Ishmael
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.
Q 25In Nineteen Eighty-Four, what has Great Britain been renamed?
Airstrip One
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.
Q 26In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston works at the Ministry of what?
Truth
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.
Q 27To Kill a Mockingbird won which award a year after its 1960 publication?
The Pulitzer
The Pulitzer. Harper Lee then published no other novel for 55 years, until Go Set a Watchman, written before Mockingbird, appeared in 2015.
Q 28Who narrates The Great Gatsby?
Nick Carraway
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.
Q 29Which is Shakespeare's longest play?
Hamlet
Hamlet. Kenneth Branagh's 1996 film was the first to keep every line of the play, and it runs about four hours.
Q 30Which playhouse burned down during Shakespeare's Henry VIII?
The Globe
The Globe. A stage cannon set its thatched roof alight in 1613, and the actors themselves paid to rebuild it within a year.