Careful!
Before conductors used batons, they kept time by banging a long staff against the floor. In January 1687, Jean-Baptiste Lully was conducting a Te Deum in this way when he struck his toe. The wound turned gangrenous, the gangrene spread — and he died.
The "Cat Raphael"
Born in Bern in 1768, the autistic Gottfried Mind could barely write his name, but on seeing a cat in a painting by his drawing-master, he immediately said, "That is no cat!" The master asked whether he thought he could do better, and Mind produced a drawing so good that the master copied it.
Thereafter Mind worked surrounded by cats, painting them with a remarkable eye for their individual character and occasionally carving them from chestnuts for sport. In the work of other artists it's said that he liked nothing but the lions of Rubens, Rembrandt, and Paulus Potter, and he looked down even on celebrated cats by Cornelius Vischer and Wenzel Hollar.
"First and last," said Goethe, "what is demanded of genius is love of truth."
See Other Canvas
Picasso's full name was Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Clito Ruiz y Picasso.
"Dürer in the Forest"
Etching by Hungarian artist István Orosz.
Oscar Wilde said, "Life imitates art far more than art imitates life."
Unquote
"See what will happen if you don't stop biting your fingernails?" — Will Rogers, to his niece on seeing the Venus de Milo
Shades of Gray
An optical illusion. Squares A and B are the same color.
"The Librarian"
Giuseppe Arcimboldo's caricature of Rudolf II's historiographer and librarian, Wolfgang Lazio (1514-1565) — a collector of coins and a lover of books.
Fleeting Beauty
"All Is Vanity" (1892), by the American illustrator C. Allan Gilbert.
Back up to get the full effect.
All Art Is Theft
Irish astronomer William Parsons might have been surprised to see van Gogh's The Starry Night appear in 1889.
He had drawn this sketch of the Whirlpool Galaxy 44 years earlier:
Carceri d'Invenzione
Artist Giovanni Piranesi spent his days making etchings of Roman ruins, but apparently he had a darker side. In the mid-1700s he published 14 prints of "imaginary prisons" — hellish vaults, machines and staircases taken from no earthly subject.
It's not known for certain what inspired them. Coleridge told Thomas De Quincy they record Piranesi's visions during a fever.
