Art: quotes, facts and reflections - Page 2

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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.

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Michelangelo painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican between 1508 and 1512 standing on a tall wooden scaffold with his head tilted back, not lying down as is often imagined. The ceiling, about 35 by 14 metres, holds more than 300 figures.

Pope Julius II commissioned the ceiling. Michelangelo saw himself as a sculptor rather than a painter and accepted reluctantly; the contract was signed on 8 May 1508. He rejected the first scaffold, which hung on ropes through holes in the vault, and had a freestanding one built instead. His early biographers Giorgio Vasari and Ascanio Condivi both say he worked standing, and Vasari describes the discomfort of painting with his head bent backwards for so long. The lying-down version comes from another writer of the time, Paolo Giovio. Michelangelo is thought to have joked about the strain in a comic poem to a friend, with a sketch in the margin of a figure painting overhead. The ceiling was painted in fresco, on patches of fresh plaster laid each day, and the modern restoration mapped each of these daily sections. It was unveiled on 31 October 1512.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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In true fresco, the painter brushes pigment mixed only with water onto fresh, wet lime plaster. As the plaster dries, it reacts with the air and binds the colour into the wall itself, which is why frescoes can last for centuries.

Fresco means “fresh” in Italian. Wet lime plaster absorbs carbon dioxide from the air and slowly turns into calcium carbonate, a kind of limestone, trapping the pigment as it hardens. The plaster sets within the day, so each morning only as much fresh plaster is laid as can be painted that day. This patch is called a giornata, Italian for “a day's work”, and its faint seams often remain visible. A mistake means chipping the plaster off and starting again. Some colours, especially blues such as ultramarine, did not work in wet lime, so they were added later on dry plaster, a method called secco (“dry”); paint applied this way flakes off more easily. Among the oldest known true frescoes are Minoan wall paintings from Crete and Santorini of the second millennium BC. Giotto's Scrovegni Chapel in Padua and Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling are famous later examples.

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Chiaroscuro, Italian for “light-dark”, is the use of strong contrast between light and shadow in a picture. Shading from light to dark makes figures look rounded and solid, and a bright patch set against darkness draws the eye and adds drama.

Painters in ancient Greece already shaded their figures; the Athenian painter Apollodoros, in the 5th century BC, was remembered as a pioneer. The word itself began in Renaissance Italy for drawings on tinted paper, where artists worked up to the light with white paint and down to the dark with ink. Leonardo da Vinci used soft chiaroscuro to model faces. Around 1600 Caravaggio pushed it to extremes, lighting figures with a single hard beam against near-black backgrounds, a style called tenebrism, from Italian tenebroso, “dark”. Rembrandt, Georges de La Tour with his candlelit scenes and Joseph Wright of Derby followed in different ways. Cinema borrowed the idea: the deep shadows of the black-and-white crime films of the 1940s, known as film noir, are chiaroscuro lighting.

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Negative space is the empty area around and between the subjects of an image. Artists and designers treat it as part of the composition: it gives the eye somewhere to rest, sharpens outlines and can even form hidden shapes of its own.

A famous demonstration is the Rubin vase, devised around 1915 by the Danish psychologist Edgar Rubin: the same outline can be seen as a white vase or as two dark faces in profile, but never both at once. Psychologists call this figure–ground perception: the brain's habit of splitting a scene into a subject and a background. Designers use it on purpose. The FedEx logo, designed in 1994 by Lindon Leader, hides an arrow in the white gap between the E and the x. In page and screen design the same idea is called white space: generous margins and gaps between lines make text easier to read. Japanese has the word ma for a meaningful gap or pause, used of gardens, buildings and music, where a well-placed silence does what empty space does in a picture.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Complementary colours sit opposite each other on the colour wheel, such as blue and orange, red and green, or yellow and purple. Placed side by side they make each other look more intense; mixed together as paint they cancel out into a dull grey or brown.

The effect was studied scientifically by the French chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul, who became director of dyeing at the Gobelins tapestry works in Paris in 1824 after complaints about its colours. He found that the criticised black dye was in fact excellent; it only looked weak and reddish when surrounded by blues and purples. His 1839 book on “simultaneous contrast”, the way neighbouring colours shift each other, was widely read by painters, including the Impressionists. The eye plays a part too: stare at a red patch for half a minute, then look at a white wall, and you see a blue-green afterimage, because parts of the visual system briefly tire. Van Gogh used the effect deliberately; of The Night Café (1888) he wrote that he had tried to express terrible human passions with red and green.

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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.

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Mark Rothko painted huge canvases filled with soft-edged blocks of colour, but insisted they were about emotions such as tragedy and ecstasy, not about colour. When viewers wept in front of them, he took it as proof that the feeling had reached them.

Rothko (1903–1970) was born in Daugavpils, in today's Latvia, and moved to the United States as a child. From about 1949 he painted the works he is known for: large, glowing rectangles of colour on a coloured ground, a style often called colour field painting. In a 1956 conversation with the writer Selden Rodman, later printed in Rodman's book Conversations with Artists, he said he was interested only in basic human emotions, and that people who wept before his pictures were having the same religious experience he had while painting them. He made the canvases big so that viewers would feel inside them, advised standing as close as about 45 cm, and asked for soft, low lighting. His last great project was the Rothko Chapel in Houston: 14 dark canvases for a quiet room open to people of all faiths, which opened in 1971, a year after his death.

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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.

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Vantablack, a coating made in Britain from tiny carbon tubes, absorbs up to 99.965% of visible light. A crumpled or curved object coated with it loses all visible shape and looks like a flat hole cut out of space.

Vantablack was unveiled in 2014 by Surrey NanoSystems, a British company, after early work at the UK's National Physical Laboratory. VANTA stands for 'vertically aligned nanotube arrays'. The original version is not a paint: it is a dense forest of carbon nanotubes, tubes of carbon atoms thousands of times thinner than a human hair, grown upright on a surface. Light that enters the forest bounces between the tubes until it is absorbed and turned into heat, so almost none returns to the eye. Its main uses are scientific, such as stopping stray light in telescopes and cameras. In 2016 it emerged that the sculptor Anish Kapoor held exclusive rights to use it in art, which angered many artists. Stuart Semple replied with 'the world's pinkest pink', a paint sold to anyone except Kapoor, and later with cheaper black paints. In 2019 MIT engineers reported an even darker material.

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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.

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