Five Interesting Facts About Famous Paintings

When the art itself is so interesting, there has got to be as intriguing a story behind the creation of it. Here we share Five Interesting Facts About Famous Paintings.

1. The debate of who the lady with the enigmatic smile is has been a highly contested subject for years with some even putting forth the theory of it being the artist himself in drag! However, Leonardo Da Vinci did not have to look far according to research. It has been concluded that the Mona Lisa is most likely the portrait of a woman named Lisa Gherardini, hailing from a prominent Florentine family whose father was well acquainted with Leonardo’s father. This most famous painting could possibly have been commissioned by him.

2.  While a patient at Saint-Paul-de-Mausole, a psychiatric hospital, Vincent van Gogh painted The Starry Night. The hospital was located in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in the south of France and it is that town that the artist depicted in the painting.

3. Agostino di Duccio had a slab of marble cut to make a statue of Hercules but abandoned it along the way. Unused for 10 years, Rossellino, another sculptor decided to work with it but also abandoned his work as the marble was too difficult to work with. 43 years later, in 1501, Michelangelo began work on a sculpture using that same slab and turned it into the magnificent sculpture of David by 1504.

4. Never finding the need to explain his work, Salvador Dali did once say that his idea to paint melting clocks in The Persistence of Memory came from the chunks of Camembert cheese he had seen melting in the sun. We will never know if it was just a cheesy sense of humour or if the artist was actually inspired by the French cheese.

5. Andy Warhol created his 1962 Pop Art based on Campbell’s Soup Cans as a set of 32 individual silkscreened artworks for the 32 varieties sold by the company at that time. Since the artist never gave instructions on the order of display, the Museum of Modern Art arranged them in the order in which the soups were originally introduced by the Campbell’s.

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