Art: quotes, facts and reflections - Page 4

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WonderArt

Ultramarine, the deepest blue of medieval and Renaissance painting, was made by grinding lapis lazuli, a stone mined in one remote valley of Afghanistan. At times it was as costly as gold.

The stone came almost entirely from the mines at Sar-i-Sang in north-eastern Afghanistan and reached Europe along long trade routes; the name comes from the Latin ultramarinus, 'beyond the sea'. Turning it into paint was slow work too, because simply grinding lapis gives only a dull greyish blue. Renaissance patrons often wrote into contracts how much ultramarine a painter could use, and painters saved it for the most important details, such as the Virgin Mary's robe. In 1824 a French society offered 6,000 francs for an artificial version. Jean-Baptiste Guimet developed one in 1826, and the German chemist Christian Gmelin published his own method in 1828. Cheap synthetic ultramarine soon replaced the mineral in most artists' paints.

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WonderArt

Saffron is among the world's most expensive spices by weight. It is made from the three red threads at the centre of each saffron crocus flower, and every thread is picked by hand.

The red threads are the flower's stigmas, the tips of its female parts where pollen would normally land. Each saffron crocus (Crocus sativus) has only three, so a kilogram of dried saffron takes roughly 150,000 to 200,000 flowers. The flowers bloom for just a few weeks in autumn and are usually gathered early in the morning, before they wilt in the sun; the threads are then plucked out one by one and dried. Oddly, the saffron crocus cannot make seeds at all: it is sterile, so every plant grows from bulb-like corms that farmers dig up, divide and replant. Iran grows about 90 per cent of the world's saffron.

History of trade (saffron)Read card

WonderScience

The dazzling blue of a morpho butterfly's wings contains no blue pigment; it comes from microscopic ridges on the wing scales that reflect light in a way that strengthens blue.

Morpho butterflies live in the tropical forests of Central and South America. Their blue is a structural colour. Instead of a pigment absorbing some colours and reflecting others, tiny layered ridges on each wing scale, far thinner than a hair, bounce light back so that blue light waves line up and reinforce each other while other colours cancel out. Peacock feathers and soap bubbles make colour in the same way. Because the colour lives in the shape, it shifts as the viewing angle changes and disappears if the scales are crushed. In flight the blue flashes on and off as the wings open and close, which may help males signal to one another and make the butterfly harder for birds to follow.

Optics (structural colour)Read card

WonderArt

The Terracotta Army is thousands of life-sized clay soldiers buried around 210 BC to guard the tomb of China's first emperor. They were assembled from moulded parts, then finished by hand so that no two figures look quite the same.

The army was made for Qin Shi Huang, who united China's warring states and ruled as its first emperor from 221 BC until his death in 210 BC. Work on his tomb began in 246 BC, when he became king of Qin at the age of thirteen. Farmers digging a well near Xi'an found the first fragments on 29 March 1974. The three main pits are thought to hold more than 8,000 soldiers, 130 chariots with 520 horses and 150 cavalry horses, and most figures are still in the ground. Researchers have identified about ten basic face shapes; craftsmen then added clay to give each soldier his own features. The figures were once brightly painted, but in the dry air the lacquer beneath the paint can curl within 15 seconds and flake off in about four minutes.

Archaeology (Terracotta Army)Read card

WonderArt

A life-sized painting of a wild pig in a cave on Sulawesi, Indonesia, is at least 45,500 years old, one of the oldest known pictures of an animal.

The painting, in the cave of Leang Tedongnge, shows a Sulawesi warty pig about 136 by 54 centimetres, drawn in dark red ochre, a natural iron-rich pigment, with two hand stencils above its back. A team led by Adam Brumm and Maxime Aubert dated it with uranium-series dating: they measured how much uranium had slowly turned into thorium in a thin mineral crust that grew over the paint. Because the crust formed after the painting, the result is a minimum age. Sulawesi lies between Asia and Australia, on the sea route early modern humans took. Older art has since been dated nearby: a scene of a pig and human-like figures in Leang Karampuang, at least 51,200 years old (2024), and a hand stencil on Muna island, at least 67,800 years old (2026).

Archaeology (Leang Tedongnge, Sulawesi)Read card

WonderArt

The Nazca Lines are giant drawings on the desert floor of southern Peru, made between about 500 BC and AD 500 by clearing away dark reddish stones to reveal the pale ground beneath.

Most of the lines were made by the Nazca culture, which flourished in the region between about 200 BC and AD 500. Beside hundreds of straight lines and geometric shapes, more than 70 figures show animals and plants: a hummingbird 93 metres long, a condor of 134 metres, a monkey of about 93 by 58 metres and a spider of 47 metres. They have survived because this is one of the driest places on Earth, where rain almost never falls. Their purpose is still debated; ideas include ritual walking paths and ceremonies linked to water. Parts can be seen from the surrounding foothills, so their makers did not need a view from the air. UNESCO listed the lines in 1994, and in 2024 Japanese researchers using artificial intelligence reported 303 previously unknown figures nearby.

Archaeology (Nazca Lines)Read card

StillnessArt

France's 17,000-year-old Lascaux cave paintings were closed to the public in 1963 because the breath, warmth and lamps of thousands of visitors were feeding mould and algae on the walls.

Four teenagers found the cave on 12 September 1940. Marcel Ravidat, 18, came upon a hole left by an uprooted tree and returned with Jacques Marsal, Georges Agnel and Simon Coencas. Inside were hundreds of painted animals, mostly horses, deer and aurochs, a huge wild ox now extinct; counting engravings, the cave holds nearly 6,000 figures made roughly 17,000 to 22,000 years ago. Lascaux opened to the public in 1948, and by 1955 about 1,200 people a day were filing through. The carbon dioxide and moisture they brought damaged the walls, and the cave was closed in 1963. Visitors now see full-size replicas nearby: Lascaux II, opened in 1983, and the larger Lascaux IV, opened in 2016.

Conservation (Lascaux)Read card

StillnessArt

Byzantine church mosaics were made of thousands of small glass tiles with gold leaf sealed inside, set at slightly different angles so that candle and lamplight would catch them and the walls would shimmer as you moved.

Each small piece is called a tessera. To make a gold one, craftsmen laid a thin sheet of gold leaf on glass and covered it with another thin layer of glass, so the gold was sealed in and protected from wear. The most famous surviving examples are in the Basilica of San Vitale in Ravenna, Italy, consecrated in 547, where mosaics show the emperor Justinian I and the empress Theodora with their courts. San Vitale is one of eight early Christian buildings in Ravenna on UNESCO's World Heritage List. In Istanbul, the mosaics of Hagia Sophia and of the Chora Church, known in Turkish as Kariye, use the same gold-glass technique.

Byzantine art (Ravenna mosaics)Read card

StillnessArt

The Book of Kells, a Latin copy of the four Gospels made around AD 800, turns its text into pages of dense, coloured ornament painted with carefully prepared inks and pigments.

It was made by monks of the community founded by St Columba, probably begun on the island of Iona off Scotland and continued at Kells in Ireland after Viking raids drove the monks there. Its 340 surviving leaves, 680 pages, were given to Trinity College Dublin in 1661. Since 1953 they have been bound in four volumes; one is always on display, and the open page changes every 12 weeks. Studies of the colours found red and yellow ochre, a green copper pigment, woad for blue and a lichen dye for purple. Lapis lazuli, once assumed, was not used, and neither was gold; the woad and lichen point to an origin in what is now Scotland.

Medieval manuscripts (Book of Kells)Read card

WonderArt

The Statue of Liberty was the shiny reddish-brown of new copper when it was unveiled in 1886. Its famous green is a patina, a thin crust that formed over about thirty years as the copper reacted with air and moisture.

The statue was designed by the French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi as a gift from the people of France to the United States, and it stands on an iron framework designed by Gustave Eiffel. Its skin is made of copper sheets only about 2.4 millimetres thick, roughly two pennies placed together, hammered into shape by hand. As the copper reacted with rain, sea air and city smoke, it grew a green layer of copper salts. According to the US National Park Service, it took about thirty years for the whole statue to turn green. The patina is not damage: it seals the surface and protects the copper beneath from further corrosion.

Metallurgy (Statue of Liberty)Read card

WonderArt

Auguste Rodin's The Thinker was first called The Poet. It began as a small figure, thought to be Dante, sitting above Rodin's great sculpted doorway The Gates of Hell and pondering his poem. Rodin enlarged it in 1902, and it became one of the best-known sculptures in the world.

Rodin was commissioned in 1880 to make a monumental doorway for a planned museum of decorative arts in Paris, and he filled it with figures from Dante's Divine Comedy, the medieval Italian poem whose first part is a journey through Hell. The seated man at the top was meant to be the poet looking down on his own creation. Rodin later showed the figure on its own, enlarged to about 1.8 metres. The first full-size bronze, paid for by public subscription, stood in front of the Panthéon in Paris from 1906 until it moved to the Musée Rodin in 1922. About 27 other full-size casts are known around the world.

Sculpture (Auguste Rodin)Read card

StillnessArt

Gustav Klimt worked actual gold and silver leaf into paintings like 'The Kiss', so the surface catches light almost like the Byzantine mosaics that inspired him.

Klimt's father was an engraver who worked in gold, so the material was familiar from childhood, and Klimt had already used gold leaf in paintings such as Judith I of 1901. A trip to Italy in 1903, when he saw the glittering Byzantine mosaics of the Church of San Vitale in Ravenna, pushed him further. The Kiss, painted in 1907 and 1908 in oil with gold leaf, silver and platinum, is the high point of what scholars call his Golden Period. The Austrian government bought it, still unfinished, when it was first exhibited in Vienna in 1908, and it hangs today in the Upper Belvedere.

Art history (Gustav Klimt)Read card

WonderArt

Wassily Kandinsky, one of the pioneers of abstract painting, linked every colour to a sound. In his 1911 book he likened light blue to a flute, darker blue to a cello and the deepest blue to an organ.

The book, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, argued that colour and form can move a viewer directly, the way music does, without showing anything recognisable. Kandinsky wrote that the sound of colours is so definite that nobody would try to express bright yellow in the bass notes. He also recalled that hearing Wagner's opera Lohengrin in Moscow had made him 'see' colours. Whether this was true synaesthesia, a condition in which one sense triggers another, is still debated. In 1911 he also co-founded the Munich artists' group Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) with Franz Marc, and he gave his paintings musical titles such as Improvisation and Composition.

Art history (Wassily Kandinsky)Read card

WonderArt

When cheap Japanese woodblock prints reached 19th-century Europe, artists such as Van Gogh and Monet were struck by their flat colour, bold cropping and everyday subjects, and their own work changed.

The French critic Philippe Burty coined the word 'Japonisme' for the craze in 1872. It had been building since the 1850s, when Japan opened its ports to foreign trade after two centuries of near-isolation and its prints, fans and ceramics began reaching Paris and London. Monet collected more than two hundred Japanese prints for his house at Giverny. Van Gogh, who also collected them, made close oil copies of two prints by Hiroshige in 1887 and painted Japanese characters around their borders. Ideas that had looked like fixed rules of Western painting, such as a single vanishing point, turned out to be one tradition among others.

Art history (Japonisme)Read card

WonderArt

In 1990, two thieves dressed as police officers took thirteen works, including a Vermeer and a Rembrandt, from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. It is the most valuable museum theft on record and is still unsolved; the empty frames still hang on the walls.

On the night of 18 March 1990 the two men talked their way in by claiming to answer a disturbance call, tied up the two guards and spent 81 minutes in the galleries. The museum offers a 10-million-dollar reward, the largest ever offered by a private institution. In 2013 the FBI said it had identified the thieves with a high degree of confidence, and in 2015 that both were dead; no one has been charged. The stolen Rembrandt is his only known seascape, and Vermeer's The Concert may be the most valuable stolen object in the world. Isabella Stewart Gardner's will forbade changes to the arrangement of her collection, so the empty frames stay where the paintings hung.

Art crime (Isabella Stewart Gardner heist)Read card

WonderArt

Picasso's 'Guernica', a vast grey-and-black canvas of screaming figures, was his response to the 1937 bombing of a Basque town, and a tapestry copy now hangs at the entrance to the UN Security Council.

Picasso painted it in a few weeks for the Spanish Republic's pavilion at the 1937 Paris International Exposition, after German and Italian aircraft supporting Franco bombed Guernica on 26 April 1937, killing and wounding hundreds of civilians. He would not let it go to Spain while Franco ruled; it spent decades at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and reached Madrid only in 1981, six years after Franco's death. Since 1992 it has hung in the Museo Reina Sofía. The UN tapestry, commissioned by Nelson Rockefeller in 1955, was hidden behind a blue curtain in February 2003 during press conferences making the case for war in Iraq; officials said television crews had asked for a plainer backdrop.

Art history (Picasso's Guernica)Read card

StillnessArt

Tibetan Buddhist monks build sand mandalas, intricate circular pictures of a deity's palace, grain by grain over days or weeks. Then they ceremonially sweep them away and pour the sand into flowing water.

The coloured sand is poured through narrow, ridged metal funnels called chak-pur: rubbing a rod along the ridges makes the sand trickle out a few grains at a time. Each mandala is a flat plan of a three-dimensional sacred palace; the Kalachakra mandala alone contains 722 deities. When it is finished, the monks hold a dissolution ceremony. They sweep the design into a heap, collect the sand in a jar wrapped in silk and carry it to a river or other moving water, so that its blessing spreads out into the world. The whole ritual is a lesson in impermanence, the Buddhist teaching that nothing material lasts.

Tibetan Buddhist art (sand mandala)Read card

WonderArt

Chinese porcelain was prized in Europe for centuries before anyone there could make it, which is why English still calls fine tableware 'china'. The secret was cracked in Saxony in 1708 by Johann Friedrich Böttger, a young alchemist held captive to make gold, working with the scientist Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus.

Böttger had boasted that he could turn base metal into gold, so Augustus the Strong, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, kept him under guard from 1701 and set him to work. The breakthrough was shared. Tschirnhaus had long experimented with local clays and minerals, including kaolin, the white clay that is the key to true hard porcelain, but he died suddenly in October 1708. Böttger, apparently working from his notes, told the king within a week that he could make porcelain. Production began at the Albrechtsburg castle in Meissen in 1710, where the secret of this 'white gold' could be guarded from rival courts.

History of ceramics (porcelain)Read card

WonderArt

The Winged Victory of Samothrace, a Greek marble statue carved around 190 BC, shows Nike, the goddess of victory, alighting on the prow of a warship. It has lost its head and both arms, yet it is one of the Louvre's most admired works.

Samothrace is a small Greek island in the northern Aegean. Charles Champoiseau, then acting head of the French consulate in Adrianople (today's Edirne in Turkey), found the statue there in pieces in April 1863, and it reached Paris in May 1864. Its ship-shaped base followed later, and since 1884 the reassembled statue has stood at the top of the Louvre's Daru staircase. In 1950 the Louvre's Jean Charbonneaux found the palm of the right hand at the site, and it was joined to two fingers that Austrian excavators had found in 1875 and that were kept in Vienna. The hand has been shown beside the statue since 1954.

Classical sculpture (Winged Victory)Read card

WonderArt

Trompe-l'oeil, French for 'deceive the eye', is painting so exact that a painted fly, curtain or open door can trick you, for a second, into thinking it is real and three-dimensional.

The Roman writer Pliny the Elder tells of a contest between two Greek painters: Zeuxis painted grapes so convincing that birds flew down to peck at them, but Parrhasius won with a painted curtain that Zeuxis himself tried to pull aside. The fly has its own legend. The Renaissance biographer Giorgio Vasari wrote that the young Giotto painted a fly on the nose of a figure by his master Cimabue, who tried to brush it away. Later painters kept up the game, from a painted violin that seems to hang on a door at Chatsworth House in England to Andrea Pozzo's ceiling in the church of Sant'Ignazio in Rome, which seems to open onto the sky.

Painting technique (trompe-l'oeil)Read card

StillnessArt

Leonardo da Vinci perfected sfumato, from the Italian for 'smoked', a way of blending tones so gradually that there are no hard outlines: light melts into shadow like smoke.

Leonardo is often quoted as describing the effect as blending 'without lines or borders, in the manner of smoke'. In 2010 French researchers used X-ray fluorescence, a way of reading the chemistry of paint without touching it, to study the faces in Leonardo's paintings, including the Mona Lisa. They found the shadows were built up from many translucent layers of glaze, some only a thousandth or two of a millimetre thick, each left to dry before the next. Leonardo began the portrait around 1503 and seems to have kept working on it for years. The effect is most famous around her mouth and eyes, where the corners of the smile dissolve into shadow, so her expression seems to change as you look.

Painting technique (sfumato)Read card

WonderArt

The oldest surviving photograph taken with a camera is a blurry view of rooftops from an upstairs window at Le Gras, Nicéphore Niépce's country house in France. It was made in 1826 or 1827, and the exposure lasted many hours, perhaps days.

Niépce called his process heliography, 'sun writing'. He coated a pewter plate with bitumen of Judea, a natural asphalt that hardens in light, and placed it in a camera obscura, a simple box camera, pointed out of the window. Where light fell, the bitumen hardened; the rest was washed away with a mixture of lavender oil and white petroleum, leaving the image. Sunlight falls on both sides of the buildings, so the exposure was long: traditionally put at about eight hours, though a modern researcher who recreated the process concluded it must have lasted several days. The plate is kept at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas, in a sealed, oxygen-free case.

History of photography (Niépce)Read card

WonderArt

Michelangelo's David and Pietà are both carved from Carrara marble, the white stone of the Apuan Alps in Tuscany, which the Romans were quarrying more than 2,000 years ago and which is still cut there today.

The block that became David came from the Fantiscritti quarry, an old Roman quarry at the heart of the Carrara marble basins. In 1465 the sculptor Agostino di Duccio chose it for a giant statue for Florence Cathedral. He roughed out the legs, feet and torso, then stopped when work halted in 1466; a contract with Antonio Rossellino in 1476 was also cancelled. For another twenty-five years the marble lay neglected and exposed to the weather in the yard of the cathedral workshop. On 16 August 1501 Michelangelo, then 26, signed the contract and carved the David from it.

Sculpture (Carrara marble)Read card

DrivePhilosophy

What is now proved was once only imagined.

The line is one of the 'Proverbs of Hell', a page of sharp sayings in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Like most of his books, Blake made it by hand: he etched words and pictures on copper plates, printed them himself and coloured the pages with his wife Catherine, as no ordinary publisher could reproduce them. He earned his living as an engraver and was largely ignored as a poet and painter in his lifetime; only later was he recognised as one of the great figures of English Romanticism.

William BlakeRead card