Art and attention: curated ideas

About this collection

Where to begin.

Meet artists and composers, then explore how their materials and methods shaped the work.

WonderArt

The Great Wave off Kanagawa by the Japanese artist Hokusai is not a single painting but a woodblock print, published around 1831. Carved blocks were inked and pressed onto paper by hand, and an estimated 8,000 copies were made; just over a hundred early ones survive in museums around the world.

Hokusai was about 71 when he made it as the first print of his series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji; the snow-capped mountain sits small behind the wave and three fishing boats. Japanese prints of this kind, called ukiyo-e (“pictures of the floating world”), were a team effort: the artist drew the design, a carver cut a separate woodblock for each colour, a printer inked the blocks and pressed the paper onto them, and a publisher, here Nishimuraya Yohachi, sold them. The deep blue is Prussian blue, a synthetic pigment newly imported from Europe that fades less than traditional indigo. About 1,000 copies were printed at first; as the blocks wore, later impressions lost detail. When Japan opened to the West in the later 19th century, such prints poured into Europe, and in 1905 Claude Debussy asked for the wave on the cover of his orchestral work La Mer.

Art historyRead card

WonderArt

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) was a master of counterpoint: writing several independent melodies that sound at the same time and fit together. In a fugue, one short theme enters again and again in different voices, following strict rules. That precision is why his music can sound mathematical, while it still moves listeners.

Bach's rules could be very strict. In his Goldberg Variations, published in 1741, an opening aria is followed by 30 variations, and every third one is a canon, in which a second voice repeats the first a little later. The gap in pitch between the two voices grows by one step each time, from the same note in variation 3 to nine notes apart in variation 27. In The Art of Fugue, left unfinished at his death, the last fugue brings in a theme that spells his own name in German note letters: B flat, A, C and B natural, written B, A, C, H. After he died his style was thought old-fashioned, yet composers kept studying it; Mozart and Beethoven both learned from his Well-Tempered Clavier. In 1829 the young Felix Mendelssohn conducted the St Matthew Passion in Berlin, starting a wider Bach revival.

BritannicaRead card

StillnessArt

In 1723 Bach became director of music for the main churches of Leipzig. The job meant a cantata, a piece for choir, soloists and orchestra, for nearly 60 Sundays and feast days a year. In his first year he composed most of them new, week after week, alongside some reworked earlier pieces.

Bach's official title was Thomaskantor, music master of St Thomas School, and he held the post from 1723 until his death in 1750. Each cantata had to suit that Sunday's Bible readings and was performed during the service at St Thomas or St Nicholas church. His first annual cycle began on 30 May 1723; alongside the new works he restaged and adapted some cantatas from his earlier post in Weimar. Music paused for most of Advent and Lent, the quiet seasons before Christmas and Easter. Senior pupils of the school sang in the choir and helped rehearse and copy out the parts by hand. His obituary, written by his son Carl Philipp Emanuel and a former pupil, speaks of five complete annual cycles. More than 200 of his cantatas survive; many others are lost.

Creative reflection based on Bach contextRead card

StillnessArt

John Cage's 4′33″ (1952) is a piece of music in which the performers play nothing for four minutes and 33 seconds, so the audience hears the sounds of the room instead.

Pianist David Tudor gave the premiere on 29 August 1952 at the Maverick Concert Hall near Woodstock, New York. He sat at the piano and closed the lid to begin each of the three movements, opening it to end them. Cage recalled that wind stirred the trees outside during the first movement, rain pattered on the roof in the second, and in the third the audience muttered and some walked out. Two things led him to the piece: Robert Rauschenberg's all-white paintings, and a 1951 visit to an anechoic chamber at Harvard, a room built to absorb almost all sound. There he still heard two sounds, which he was told were his nervous system and his blood. He concluded that true silence does not exist.

MoMARead card

WonderArt

Many of the footsteps, rustling clothes and small everyday sounds in a film are recreated after shooting by Foley artists, who perform them in a studio while watching the picture.

The craft is named after Jack Foley, who worked at Universal Pictures. When sound arrived in cinema, Universal's Show Boat (1929), begun as a silent film, needed sound added after filming, and Foley and his team performed effects live in time with the projected picture. He went on doing this work for about 30 years. Today Foley artists walk on trays of gravel, wood or concrete in different shoes, rub fabric close to the microphone and use props: cornstarch squeezed in a leather pouch, for example, sounds like footsteps in snow. The microphone on set mostly records dialogue, so these sounds are added separately, and a separate effects track is also needed when a film is dubbed into another language.

Academy Museum of Motion PicturesRead card

DriveArt

Katsushika Hokusai, the Japanese artist behind the famous print The Great Wave, wrote at about 75 that nothing he had made before the age of seventy was worth counting. By 110, he hoped, every dot and every line he drew would be alive.

The lines come from the afterword to his picture book One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji, published in 1834, when he was 75 by the traditional Japanese count. He writes that he had loved drawing the shapes of things since the age of six, and that only at seventy-three had he begun to grasp the structure of animals, birds, insects and fish and how plants grow. He hoped to go further in his eighties and nineties and to reach something divine at a hundred. He signed it Gakyō Rōjin Manji, 'the old man mad about drawing'. The Great Wave, from around 1831, was already behind him. He kept working until his death in 1849, at 88.

Katsushika HokusaiRead card

DriveArt

Hip-hop began at 1970s block parties in the Bronx, New York, where DJs used two turntables to repeat the drum breaks of records so that people could keep dancing.

Hip-hop is often dated to 11 August 1973, when Clive Campbell, known as DJ Kool Herc, played at a back-to-school party his sister Cindy held in the community room of 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx. Herc had noticed that dancers went wildest during the break, the short stretch of a record where the singing stops and the drums and rhythm take over. With two copies of the same record on two turntables, he switched from one to the other to stretch the break for minutes. Dancers who waited for it became known as b-boys and b-girls, and MCs began speaking and rhyming over the beat, which grew into rapping. DJs such as Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Bambaataa took the ideas further.

Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and CultureRead card

DriveArt

Motown, the record label Berry Gordy founded in Detroit in 1959, made its records in a converted house called Hitsville U.S.A. Between 1960 and 1969, 79 of its songs reached the American top ten.

Berry Gordy Jr. had worked on a Detroit car assembly line and written songs before he started Tamla Records in January 1959 with an 800-dollar loan from his family; the company became Motown Record Corporation in 1960. In 1959 he bought a former photography studio at 2648 West Grand Boulevard, turned the back into a small recording studio and moved his family upstairs. Songwriters, producers, the house band later known as the Funk Brothers and coaches who taught stage manners all worked under one roof, and a weekly meeting voted on which recordings to release. The Supremes, Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder came through the house. As a Black-owned label, Motown won huge white audiences at a time when American radio and charts were still divided by race.

GRAMMY Museum / Motown MuseumRead card

WonderHistory

A griot is a West African storyteller, musician and oral historian who carries memory through performance.

In Manding languages a griot is called a jeli or jali, and in Wolof a gewel. The tradition is tied to the Mali Empire, founded in the 13th century by Sundiata Keita: in the Epic of Sundiata, the griot Balla Fasséké advises the young king, and the Kouyaté family of griots, who trace their line back to him, still perform today. The role usually passes down within griot families. A griot learns genealogies, histories and praise songs by heart, often performing them with the kora, a 21-string harp-lute, the balafon, a wooden xylophone, or the ngoni, a small lute. Griots have also served as advisers to rulers, go-betweens in disputes and keepers of a community's memory of who is related to whom.

The Metropolitan Museum of ArtRead card

WonderMusic

Igor Stravinsky's ballet The Rite of Spring caused an uproar at its first performance in Paris on 29 May 1913, with its pounding, irregular rhythms and stamping dancers. Stories of a full riot grew later, but the shock was real.

The ballet was made for Sergei Diaghilev's company, the Ballets Russes, with choreography by Vaslav Nijinsky and sets and costumes by Nicholas Roerich. It shows pagan rites in ancient Russia and ends with a young woman chosen as a sacrifice, who dances until she dies. Nijinsky turned the dancers' feet inward and had them stamp rather than float. In the music, accents fall where the ear does not expect them and the metre changes from bar to bar. The conductor Pierre Monteux kept going through jeers, laughter and shouting; tales of fighting in the aisles come mostly from memories written years later. The score soon triumphed in the concert hall and is now one of the most performed works of 20th-century music.

Igor StravinskyRead card

WonderArchaeology

The Pazyryk carpet, made some 2,300 to 2,500 years ago and preserved in a frozen tomb in Siberia's Altai Mountains, is the oldest known carpet with a knotted pile, the soft surface of a rug.

The Soviet archaeologist Sergei Rudenko found it in 1949 in barrow 5 at Pazyryk, a burial mound of the horse-riding nomads of the Altai. Robbers had broken into the tomb in ancient times; water seeped in through their tunnel and froze, and the ice kept felt, wood, textiles and the carpet intact. Rudenko dated the burials to the fifth century BC; later work places this group of barrows in the fourth to third centuries BC. The carpet is about two metres square and holds around 1.25 million knots, with borders of horsemen and deer around a central field. Scholars still argue over where it was woven, with Persia, Armenia and Central Asia all proposed. It is kept at the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg.

Pazyryk carpetRead card

WonderHistory

A hoard buried in Norfolk, England, about 2,000 years ago contained a near-complete carnyx, a tall bronze war trumpet topped with an animal's head. Found in 2025 and announced in January 2026, it also held parts of a second carnyx, a boar-headed standard and five shield bosses.

The carnyx was played across Iron Age Europe, roughly between 200 BC and AD 200. Held upright, its bell, shaped like an animal's open mouth, rose high above a crowd. This is only the third found in Britain: one dredged from the River Witham in Lincolnshire in 1768 was later destroyed while its metal was being analysed, and of the Deskford carnyx, found in Scotland in 1816, only the boar's-head bell survives. A standard is an emblem carried on a pole to mark a group of fighters, and this is the first boar's-head standard found in Britain. A shield boss is the metal dome at a shield's centre that covers the hand grip. The hoard was probably buried in the first century AD, in the lands of the Iceni, the people of Boudica, who rose against Rome in AD 60 or 61.

Norfolk carnyx hoardRead card

WonderHistory

Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) filled his notebooks with inventions: flying machines, a parachute, an armoured vehicle, a vast stone bridge. Very few were built in his lifetime, and many could not have worked with the materials of his day.

Leonardo kept notes almost daily, and thousands of his pages survive, mixing anatomy, rivers and bird flight with grocery lists. In the short Codex on the Flight of Birds, written around 1505 and now in Turin, he studied how birds use the air and sketched machines to copy them. Some of his ideas have since been tested. In 2000 the British skydiver Adrian Nicholas made a safe descent under a parachute built to Leonardo's pyramid-shaped design. In 1502 Leonardo offered the Ottoman sultan Bayezid II a single stone arch 240 metres long across the Golden Horn in Istanbul. It was never built, but in 2001 a smaller wooden version opened as a footbridge in Ås, Norway, and in 2019 engineers at MIT built a scale model and found that the design would have stood.

Ikigai DailyRead card

WonderHistory

Magna Carta, Latin for “Great Charter”, was sealed by King John of England at Runnymede, beside the Thames, on 15 June 1215 to make peace with rebel barons. It promised swift justice and protection from unlawful imprisonment, and put limits on the king's power in writing.

The peace did not last. Neither side kept its promises, Pope Innocent III annulled the charter in August 1215, and the First Barons' War broke out. After John died in 1216, the advisers ruling for his nine-year-old son, Henry III, reissued a shortened version. It was issued again in 1217 and 1225, and in 1297 Edward I made it part of English statute law. Its most famous clause, number 39 in the 1215 text, promised that no free man would be imprisoned or stripped of his rights except by the lawful judgement of his equals or by the law of the land. Four copies of the 1215 charter survive: two at the British Library, one at Lincoln Castle and one at Salisbury Cathedral. Three of its clauses, as reissued in 1297, are still law in England and Wales.

Ikigai DailyRead card

WonderHistory

The Protestant Reformation spread fast partly thanks to printing. From 1517 onwards Martin Luther's writings came off the presses as short, cheap pamphlets, many of them in German rather than Latin; in the first third of the 16th century, about one in five works printed in Germany was his.

The Reformation was the 16th-century movement that split Western Christianity and created Protestant churches independent of Rome. It is usually dated from 31 October 1517, when Luther, a monk and university teacher in Wittenberg, circulated his Ninety-five Theses against the sale of indulgences, certificates the Church sold to reduce the punishment for sins. A century earlier the Czech reformer Jan Hus had made similar criticisms and was executed in 1415; the historian Lyndal Roper argues that print is the main reason Luther escaped the same fate. Johannes Gutenberg's movable-type printing, developed in the mid-15th century, made short pamphlets cheap, and presses were scattered across many German towns, so no single authority could stop them. Towns with a printing press were more likely to adopt the Reformation. As most people could not read, Luther's friend the painter Lucas Cranach the Elder made woodcut pictures that put his ideas into images.

Ikigai DailyRead card

WonderHistory

In August 1947 British rule in India ended and the land was divided along religious lines into two countries: India, with a Hindu majority, and Pakistan, with a Muslim majority. Between 12 and 20 million people had to leave their homes, in one of the largest migrations in history.

Pakistan became independent on 14 August 1947 and India on 15 August. Pakistan was made of two separate parts with India in between; the eastern part broke away in 1971 and became Bangladesh. Two large provinces with mixed populations, Punjab in the west and Bengal in the east, were split between the new states. The border was drawn by Cyril Radcliffe, a British lawyer who had never been to India and was given about five weeks for the task. It was published only on 17 August, two days after independence, so on independence day many people in the border districts did not know which country they were in. Hindus and Sikhs moved towards India and Muslims towards Pakistan, many on foot or in packed trains. There was terrible violence on both sides; estimates of the dead range from 200,000 to two million.

Ikigai DailyRead card

WonderArt

In his lifetime Bach was famous as an organist and harpsichord player, and churches invited him to test and open their new organs. He wrote his keyboard music for the organ, the harpsichord and the clavichord. The piano was still a new invention, and the modern concert grand did not yet exist.

The three instruments sound very different. On an organ, air is blown through pipes. On a harpsichord, pressing a key makes a small quill pluck the string, so the player cannot make one note louder than another by touch. On the clavichord, a small brass blade strikes the string and stays against it, which allows fine shading but is too quiet for a hall. The piano, invented by Bartolomeo Cristofori in Florence around 1700, let players play both soft and loud; its full name, pianoforte, means “soft-loud” in Italian. In the 1730s the German builder Gottfried Silbermann showed Bach one of his early pianos. Bach found the high notes too weak. In 1747, at the Potsdam court of Frederick the Great, he improvised on an improved model, and he later helped to sell Silbermann's pianos.

BritannicaRead card

WonderArt

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) left more than a thousand surviving works, from church cantatas to keyboard pieces, concertos and chamber music. They are numbered in the BWV catalogue; his first Cello Suite, for example, is known as BWV 1007.

BWV stands for Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis, German for “catalogue of Bach's works”. The musicologist Wolfgang Schmieder published it in 1950 and gave every known piece a number, grouped by type rather than by date: the church cantatas come first, as BWV 1 to 200, and the organ, keyboard, chamber and orchestral works follow. A revised third edition, prepared with the Bach-Archiv in Leipzig, appeared in 2022. Dozens of cantatas are known to be lost, partly because his manuscripts were divided among his sons after his death in 1750, and not all of them looked after their share. After his death most of his music fell out of use, apart from keyboard works studied by musicians such as Mozart and Beethoven, until Felix Mendelssohn revived the St Matthew Passion, Bach's great choral setting of the suffering and death of Jesus, in Berlin in 1829.

BritannicaRead card

DriveArt

Between June 1724 and March 1725, Bach wrote about 40 cantatas in a row for the churches of Leipzig, one for almost every Sunday and holiday. A cantata is a piece for choir, soloists and orchestra sung during the service, and each of these was built on a well-known Lutheran hymn, using its words and its tune.

Bach became Thomaskantor, the director of church music in Leipzig, in 1723, and in his first year he supplied a cantata almost every week, some adapted from earlier works. For his second year he set himself a plan: each cantata would be built on one Lutheran hymn, or chorale. The opening chorus sets the first verse with the hymn tune in the sopranos, the middle verses are reworded for solo singers, and a plain four-part setting of the last verse closes the piece. The idea may have been inspired by the 200th anniversary of the first Lutheran hymn books, printed in 1524. The series stopped after Palm Sunday 1725, possibly because the writer who reworded the hymns for him, probably Andreas Stübel, had died that January. The Bach scholar Klaus Hofmann has called it the largest musical project Bach ever undertook.

BritannicaRead card

WonderHistory

Johannes Gutenberg's Bible, printed in Mainz in the 1450s, was the first major European book made with movable metal type. Yet it was made to look like a luxury manuscript: its letters imitate scribes' handwriting, colours were added by hand, and about a quarter of the copies were printed on vellum, fine calfskin.

Scholars think Gutenberg printed between 160 and 185 copies, about three-quarters on paper and the rest on vellum. Each page has 42 lines, which is why it is also called the 42-line Bible. To imitate handwriting, his workshop needed 290 different characters, including the joined letter pairs that scribes used. Red headings, known as rubrics, were printed at first but soon left blank for a scribe to add by hand, and buyers had artists paint decorated initials and borders, so no two copies look alike. In March 1455 Enea Silvio Piccolomini, the future Pope Pius II, wrote that he had seen pages on show in Frankfurt. Of the 49 copies that survive in substantial part, a vellum one is on display at the Library of Congress in Washington.

Library of CongressRead card

WonderArt

On 21 August 1911 the Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre in Paris. It stayed missing for more than two years, and news coverage around the world turned a painting admired mainly by art lovers into one of the most famous images on Earth.

The thief was Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian decorator who had worked briefly at the Louvre and helped make the painting's protective glass case. On a Monday, when the museum was closed, he walked in wearing the white smock of the staff, lifted the painting off its hooks, left the case and frame on a service stairway and slipped out through a service door. Nobody noticed until the next day. Police questioned the poet Guillaume Apollinaire and the painter Pablo Picasso, who were both cleared. Peruggia hid the panel in a trunk in his Paris lodgings for two years, then took it by train to Florence. In December 1913 he offered it to an art dealer, who brought in the director of the Uffizi Gallery, and Peruggia was arrested. He said he wanted to return it to Italy. The Mona Lisa was back in the Louvre on 4 January 1914.

Art historyRead card

WonderArt

Ultramarine, the most prized blue of the Renaissance, was made from lapis lazuli, a stone mined in the mountains of Afghanistan. Extracting the pigment was slow and wasteful, so at times it cost as much as gold, and painters saved it for the most important parts of a picture, above all the robes of the Virgin Mary.

The name comes from Latin ultramarinus, “beyond the sea”, because the stone reached Europe by ship; Venice was the centre of the trade in the 14th and 15th centuries. The mines of Sar-i Sang, in the Badakhshan region, had supplied lapis lazuli for thousands of years, and the oldest known paintings made with it are 6th- and 7th-century murals in Afghan cave temples. Simply grinding the stone gives a dull greyish powder, so the pure blue had to be kneaded and washed out of it in a long process. The painter Cennino Cennini described it around 1400 and called ultramarine the most perfect of all pigments. Vermeer used it lavishly, as in the turban of Girl with a Pearl Earring. In 1824 a French society offered a prize for an artificial version; Jean-Baptiste Guimet produced one in 1826, and ultramarine became cheap.

Art historyRead card

WonderArt

Egyptian blue is the oldest known synthetic pigment: a colour made by a chemical recipe rather than dug from the ground. Egyptian craftsmen were producing it at least 4,500 years ago by heating sand, lime, copper and natron, a natural soda, to about 800 to 1,000 °C.

Blue was prized in ancient Egypt, but natural blue stones such as lapis lazuli and turquoise were rare, so craftsmen learned to make their own. The earliest known example may be a bowl from about 3250 BC found at Hierakonpolis. The pigment coloured tombs, statues and wall paintings, spread around the Mediterranean and became the standard blue of the Romans, who called it caeruleum; the Roman architect Vitruvius recorded a recipe in the 1st century BC. After Roman times the method was forgotten, and chemists such as Humphry Davy only began studying it again in 1815. Egyptian blue has an unusual property: under ordinary light it gives off infrared light, invisible to the eye. With infrared cameras, archaeologists can now find traces of it on statues that look unpainted.

Art historyRead card

WonderArt

Impressionism got its name from a joke. In April 1874 the critic Louis Leroy mocked an exhibition in Paris by Monet and his friends, seized on the title of Monet's painting Impression, Sunrise and called the group “the Impressionists”. By 1877 the artists were using the name themselves.

The exhibition opened in April 1874 in the former studio of the photographer Nadar. About thirty artists took part, among them Monet, Renoir, Degas, Pissarro, Sisley, Morisot and Cézanne, who had formed their own society to show their work outside the Salon, the official, state-backed annual exhibition. Monet's picture shows the harbour of Le Havre, his home town, at sunrise in quick, loose strokes. Asked for a title for the catalogue, he later recalled, he felt it could hardly pass for a view of Le Havre and told them to put down “Impression”. Leroy, writing in the humorous paper Le Charivari, joked that half-made wallpaper looked more finished. The group held eight exhibitions up to 1886. In 2014 astronomers used the sun's position and tide tables to date the scene to the morning of 13 November 1872.

Art historyRead card

WonderArt

Vincent van Gogh painted about 860 oil paintings, most of them in the two years before his death in 1890, yet he sold very little. The only painting known by name to have sold in his lifetime is The Red Vineyard, bought in 1890 for 400 francs by the Belgian painter Anna Boch.

Van Gogh lived mainly on money from his younger brother Theo, an art dealer in Paris, and the hundreds of letters they exchanged are the main source for his life and ideas. He also sold a few drawings, including views of The Hague ordered in 1882 by his uncle, an Amsterdam art dealer. Vincent died in July 1890, aged 37, and Theo died six months later. Theo's widow, Jo van Gogh-Bonger, was left with hundreds of paintings and drawings. She lent them to exhibitions, sold works with care to build his reputation and in 1914 published the letters, which helped make him famous across Europe. Their son, Vincent Willem, later placed the collection in a foundation, and the Van Gogh Museum opened in Amsterdam in 1973.

Art historyRead card

WonderArt

The Chauvet Cave in the Ardèche, southern France, holds some of the oldest and best-preserved cave paintings in the world. Its lions, horses, mammoths and rhinos were drawn in charcoal and red ochre, the oldest of them about 36,000 years ago.

Three cave explorers, Jean-Marie Chauvet, Éliette Brunel-Deschamps and Christian Hillaire, found the paintings on 18 December 1994. Thousands of years ago a rockfall had sealed the entrance, which kept the art almost untouched. Hundreds of animals from at least 13 species are shown, including many predators, such as cave lions, bears and hyenas, that are rare in other cave art. The artists scraped the walls smooth before drawing, etched around outlines to give depth and movement, and painted scenes such as two woolly rhinos butting horns. Radiocarbon dating, which measures the decay of carbon in charcoal and bone, shows two periods of use, about 37,000 to 33,500 and 31,000 to 28,000 years ago. UNESCO made it a World Heritage Site in 2014. The cave is closed to protect it, and a full-size replica opened nearby in 2015.

Art historyRead card

WonderArt

Salvator Mundi, a painting of Christ attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, sold at Christie's in New York on 15 November 2017 for $450.3 million, the highest price ever paid for a painting at auction. Twelve years earlier, heavily overpainted and thought to be a copy, it had sold for $1,175.

Salvator Mundi is Latin for “Saviour of the World”. Two art dealers bought the dark, damaged panel at a New Orleans auction in 2005 and had it restored by Dianne Dwyer Modestini, who became convinced it was Leonardo's work. London's National Gallery exhibited it as a Leonardo in 2011, and in 2013 it changed hands twice, finally for $127.5 million. Experts still disagree about it. Some accept it as Leonardo's, others believe his assistants and pupils painted much of it, and others argue that the heavy restoration makes a firm verdict impossible. The buyer in 2017 was a Saudi prince, reported to be acting for Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The painting has not been shown in public since the sale and is reported to be in storage in Saudi Arabia.

Art historyRead card

WonderArt

Mummy brown was a real artists' paint made from ground-up Egyptian mummies mixed with white pitch and myrrh. It was popular in Europe from the mid-1700s through the 1800s for shadows and skin tones, and fell out of use as mummies grew scarce and painters learned what it contained.

Long before it became a paint, material from Egyptian mummies was sold in Europe as a medicine. By 1712 a Paris colour shop called À la momie was selling powdered mummy alongside paints and varnish. The pigment gave a warm, see-through brown that suited glazes, thin transparent layers laid over other colours. The Victorian painter Edward Burne-Jones assumed the name only described the shade. In 1881, when his fellow painter Lawrence Alma-Tadema told him he had seen a mummy at a colour maker's waiting to be ground, Burne-Jones buried his tube in the garden. The paint also cracked and faded easily. In 1964 Time magazine reported that the London firm C. Roberson, the only remaining supplier, had run out of mummies. Paint sold as mummy brown today is made from iron oxide minerals and clay.

Art historyRead card

WonderArt

Leonardo da Vinci wrote most of his private notes in mirror writing: the letters run from right to left and are reversed, so they read normally in a mirror. When he wrote for other people, he used ordinary script.

Leonardo filled thousands of pages with notes and drawings on anatomy, flight, water, machines and painting, from shopping lists to designs for flying machines. The usual explanation for the mirror script is that he was left-handed: writing from right to left let his hand move away from the fresh ink instead of smudging it. The idea that he was hiding secrets is less convincing, since any mirror undoes the trick at once. After his death in 1519 the notebooks passed to his pupil Francesco Melzi and were later scattered. Today they are in collections such as the British Library and the Royal Library at Windsor Castle, and one, the Codex Leicester, was bought by Bill Gates in 1994 for about $30.8 million. Mirror writing also appears in Ottoman calligraphy, where mirrored compositions often carried a mystical meaning.

Art historyRead card

WonderArt

The Bayeux Tapestry tells the story of the Norman Conquest of England in 1066 across nearly 70 metres of linen. Despite its name it is not a tapestry, which is woven, but an embroidery: the pictures are stitched onto the cloth in coloured wool.

The cloth is about 50 centimetres tall and made of nine linen panels sewn together. Its 58 scenes, each with a short Latin caption, run from 1064 to the Battle of Hastings in 1066, where William, Duke of Normandy, defeated the English king Harold Godwinson. It shows more than 600 people, nearly a thousand animals, 41 ships and the earliest known picture of Halley's Comet. Most historians think it was commissioned by Bishop Odo of Bayeux, William's half-brother, and stitched in England, probably at Canterbury, in the 1070s, perhaps for the consecration of Bayeux Cathedral in 1077. The final section is missing. It takes its name from the town of Bayeux in Normandy, where it has been kept for most of its history, and it is listed on UNESCO's Memory of the World Register.

Art historyRead card

WonderArt

Oil paint is pigment ground in a drying oil such as linseed. It stays workable for days, so painters can blend soft transitions and build up thin, glowing layers. Netherlandish painters such as Jan van Eyck made it the main medium for pictures in the 15th century, and it soon spread across Europe.

Before oil, most European panel pictures were painted in egg tempera, which dries within minutes and has to be built up in small strokes. Oil does not dry by evaporating: it slowly reacts with oxygen in the air and hardens. That made glazes possible, thin transparent layers laid one over another so that light passes through them and reflects back from the white ground beneath, which gives skin and fabric their glow in paintings such as van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait of 1434. Van Eyck did not invent oil paint, as the 16th-century writer Giorgio Vasari claimed. The oldest known oil paintings are Buddhist murals of about AD 650 in the caves of Bamiyan, Afghanistan, and a monk writing as Theophilus described oil painting in the early 12th century. In Venice, where sailcloth was easy to find, painters such as Titian moved from wooden panels to canvas in the 16th century.

Art historyRead card

WonderArt

Michelangelo's David, 5.17 metres tall, was carved in Florence between 1501 and 1504 from a single block of marble that other sculptors had begun and abandoned decades earlier. Michelangelo, then 26, turned the awkward, already-cut block into the first giant marble statue since ancient times.

The block came from the quarries of Carrara and was bought in 1465 for a statue meant to stand high on Florence Cathedral. The sculptor Agostino di Duccio roughed out the legs and body and then stopped; Antonio Rossellino was hired in 1476 but soon dropped the job. The block, nicknamed il Gigante, “the Giant”, lay in the cathedral workshop yard, and an inventory of 1500 described it as badly blocked out. Michelangelo won the contract on 16 August 1501. The earlier cutting helps explain why the statue is unusually slender from front to back. When it was finished it was judged too heavy to lift onto the cathedral, so it was set in the city's main square, the Piazza della Signoria, as a symbol of the Florentine Republic. It moved indoors to the Galleria dell'Accademia in 1873, and a copy now stands in the square.

Art historyRead card

WonderArt

The Mexican painter Frida Kahlo (1907–1954) made herself the subject of most of her paintings. Her self-portraits show her injured body, her marriage, her Mexican roots and the traditional dress she wore, so together they tell the story of her life.

In 1925, aged 18, Kahlo was badly hurt in a bus accident in Mexico City and spent three months in bed. Her mother had an easel made that she could use lying down, with a mirror above it, and she began to paint the face she saw. She later explained that she painted herself because she was often alone and was the subject she knew best. She married the muralist Diego Rivera in 1929. Her small, detailed pictures drew on Mexican folk art and on the art of Mexico before the Spanish conquest, rather than on the huge public murals of her time. In 1939 the Louvre bought her painting The Frame, the first work by a Mexican artist in its collection. Her family home in Coyoacán, the Blue House, is now the Frida Kahlo Museum.

Art historyRead card

WonderArt

The Bauhaus, founded by the architect Walter Gropius in Weimar, Germany, in 1919, taught art, craft and industrial design in one school. In just 14 years it shaped modern furniture, typography and architecture with simple, useful forms suited to factory production.

Bauhaus means “building house” in German. Students began with a preliminary course on materials, shapes and colour, then trained in workshops for metal, weaving, furniture, printing and more, with the aim of designing objects that could be mass-produced. Teachers included the painters Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky, the weaver Gunta Stölzl and the artist László Moholy-Nagy. The school moved to Dessau in 1925, into a glass-fronted building designed by Gropius, and to Berlin in 1932. The Nazis attacked it as un-German and communist, and in 1933 it closed under their pressure. Many of its teachers emigrated: Gropius taught at Harvard, the last director, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, went to Chicago, and Bauhaus-trained architects helped build the White City of Tel Aviv.

Art historyRead card

WonderArt

Cubism, developed in Paris from about 1907 by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, showed a person or object from several viewpoints at once, broken into flat, angular facets, instead of from one fixed angle as painters had done since the Renaissance.

Both painters were inspired by the late work of Paul Cézanne, who built landscapes and still lifes out of simple blocks of colour. Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) is often seen as the starting point. The name came from critics: in 1908 Louis Vauxcelles wrote that Braque reduced everything to 'cubes'. Historians divide the movement into two phases. In Analytic Cubism (about 1910–1912), objects were split into many small facets in mostly brown and grey tones. In Synthetic Cubism (about 1912–1914), shapes became simpler and colours brighter, and the artists began gluing real materials such as newspaper and wallpaper onto their pictures; Picasso's Still Life with Chair Caning (1912) is credited as the first Cubist collage. Cubism is often called the most influential art movement of the 20th century, and it fed into Futurism, Constructivism and abstract art.

Art historyRead card

WonderArt

Vincent van Gogh painted The Starry Night in June 1889 at the asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, in southern France, where he had admitted himself a month earlier. It shows the view from his bedroom window just before sunrise, but the village and its church were added from his imagination.

Van Gogh entered the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum on 8 May 1889, a few months after a breakdown in Arles during which he injured his own ear. From his east-facing window he watched the sun rise over a walled wheat field, a view he painted at least 21 times. The Starry Night itself was made by day in a ground-floor studio, from sketches and memory. Some details are accurate: Venus, the bright “morning star” near the horizon, really was visible at that time. Others are not: the Moon was then more than half full, not a crescent, and the church spire looks more Dutch than Provençal. Van Gogh himself called the painting a failure in a letter to the painter Émile Bernard. It has hung in the Museum of Modern Art in New York since 1941.

Art historyRead card

Next collectionHidden history