Interesting facts about art

Art is part of a person’s spiritual culture, a form of artistic activity of society, a figurative expression of reality. Let’s look at the most interesting facts about art.

Interesting facts: painting

Not everyone knows that art dates back to the times of primitive people, and many of those who are aware of this are unlikely to think that the caveman owned polychrome painting.

Spanish archaeologist Marcelino Sanz de Sautola discovered the ancient Altamira cave in 1879, which contained polychrome painting. Nobody believed Sautola, and he was accused of forging the creations of primitive people. Later in 1940, an even more ancient cave with similar paintings was discovered – Lascaux in France, it was dated back to 17-15 thousand years BC. Then all charges against Sautole were dropped, but posthumously.

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Raphael “Sistine Madonna”

The true picture of the painting “The Sistine Madonna” created by Raphael can only be seen by looking closely at it. The artist’s art deceives the observer. The background in the form of clouds hides the faces of angels, and on the right hand of St. Sixtus is depicted with six fingers. This may be due to the fact that his name means “six” in Latin.

And Malevich was not the first artist who painted “Black Square”. Long before him, Allie Alphonse, a man known for his eccentric antics, exhibited his creation “The Battle of Negroes in a Cave in the Dead of Night,” which was a completely black canvas, at the Vinyen Gallery.

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Picasso “Dora Maar with a cat”

The famous artist Pablo Picasso had an explosive temperament. His love for women was cruel, many of his lovers committed suicide or ended up in a psychiatric hospital. One of these was Dora Maar, who suffered a difficult break with Picasso and subsequently ended up in a hospital. Picasso painted her portrait in 1941, when their relationship was broken. The portrait “Dora Maar with a cat” was sold in New York in 2006 for $95,2 million.

When painting “The Last Supper,” Leonardo da Vinci paid special attention to the images of Christ and Judas. He spent a very long time looking for models, as a result, for the image of Christ, Leonardo da Vinci found a person among the young singers in the church, and only three years later he was able to find a person to paint the image of Judas. He was a drunkard whom Leonardo found in a ditch and invited to the tavern to paint a picture. This man later admitted that he had already posed for the artist once, several years ago, when he sang in a church choir. It turned out that the image of Christ and Judas, by coincidence, was painted from the same person.

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Interesting facts: sculpture and architecture

• Initially, an unknown sculptor worked unsuccessfully on the famous statue of David, which was created by Michelangelo, but he was unable to complete the job and abandoned it.
• Rarely has anyone wondered about the position of the legs on an equestrian sculpture. It turns out that if a horse stands on its hind legs, then its rider died in battle, if one hoof is raised, then the rider died from battle wounds, and if the horse stands on four legs, then the rider died a natural death.
• 225 tons of copper were used for the famous statue of Gustov Eiffel – the Statue of Liberty. And the weight of the famous statue in Rio de Janeiro – the statue of Christ the Redeemer, made of reinforced concrete and soapstone, reaches 635 tons.
• The Eiffel Tower was created as a temporary exhibit to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the French Revolution. Eiffel did not expect the tower to stand for more than 20 years.
• An exact copy of the Indian Taj Mahal mausoleum was built in Bangladesh by millionaire film producer Asanullah Moni, which caused great discontent among the Indian people.
• The famous Leaning Tower of Pisa, whose construction lasted from 1173 to 1360, began to lean even during construction due to a small foundation and erosion by groundwater. Its weight is about 14453 tons. The ringing of the bell tower of the Leaning Tower of Pisa is one of the most beautiful in the world. According to the original design, the tower was supposed to be 98 meters high, but it was possible to build it only 56 meters high.

Interesting facts: photography

• Joseph Niepce created the world’s first photograph in 1826. 35 years later, English physicist James Maxwell managed to take the first color photograph.
• Photographer Oscar Gustaf Reilander used his cat to control the lighting in the studio. At that time there was no such invention as an exposure meter, so the photographer watched the cat’s pupils; if they were too narrow, he set a short shutter speed, and if the pupils dilated, he increased the shutter speed.
• The famous French singer Edith Piaf often gave concerts on the territory of military camps during the occupation. After the concerts, she took photographs with prisoners of war, whose faces were then cut out from the photographs and pasted into false passports, which Edith handed over to the prisoners during a return visit. So many prisoners managed to escape using fake documents.

Interesting facts about contemporary art

Sue Webster and Tim Noble

British artists Sue Webster and Tim Noble created an entire exhibition of sculptures made from garbage. If you just look at the sculpture, you can only see a pile of garbage, but when the sculpture is illuminated in a certain way, different projections are created, embodying different images.

Rashad Alakbarov

Azerbaijani artist Rashad Alakbarov uses shadows from various objects to create his paintings. He arranges objects in a certain way, directs the necessary lighting onto them, thus creating a shadow, from which a picture is subsequently created.

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three dimensional painting

Another unusual method of creating paintings was invented by the artist Ioan Ward, who makes his drawings on wooden canvases using molten glass.

Relatively recently, the concept of three-dimensional painting appeared. When creating a three-dimensional painting, each layer is filled with resin, and a different part of the painting is applied to each layer of resin. Thus, the result is a natural image, which is sometimes difficult to distinguish from a photograph of a living creature.