Works by German surrealist painter and sculptor Max Ernst:

• That Makes Me Piss (1919)
• The Little Tear Gland That Says Tick-Tock (1920)
• The Dog Who Shits (1920)
• Winter Landscape: Gassing of the Vulcanized Iron Maiden to Produce the Necessary Warmth for the Bed (1921)
• Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale (1924)
• The Dove Was Right (1926)
• Vision Induced by a String Found on My Table (1927)
• Vision Induced by the Words ‘The Immovable Father’ (1927)
• Scene of Severe Eroticism (1927)
• Garden Airplane-Trap (1935)
• The Harmonious Breakfast (1941)
• Young Man Intrigued by the Flight of a Non-Euclidean Fly (1942-7)
• Sign for a Herring School (1958)

Salvador Dalí invented similarly unusual titles. American avant-garde composer La Monte Young once titled a work The Obsidian Ocelot, The Sawmill, and The Blue Sawtooth High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer Refracting The Legend of The Dream of The Tortoise Traversing The 189/98 Lost Ancestral Lake Region Illuminating Quotients from The Black Tiger Tapestries of The Drone of The Holy Numbers from The Tortoise, His Dreams And Journeys.

Because he had to earn a living painting portraits, Thomas Gainsborough could not spend as much time sketching outdoors as he would have liked. So he arranged pieces of moss, rock, vegetables, and mirror into tabletop “landscapes” that he could paint at night by candlelight.

Joshua Reynolds recalled him collecting “broken stones, dried herbs, and pieces of looking glass, which he magnified and improved into rocks, trees, and water.” Another visitor wrote, “I … have more than once sat by him of an evening and seen him make models … for landscape scenery on a little old-fashioned folding oak table. … He would place cork or coal for his foregrounds; make middle grounds of sand and clay, bushes of moss and lichens, and set up distant woods of broccoli.”

Tom Jones’ “Sex Bomb” rendered in the style of a 16th-century chanson, by music theory lecturer Jonas Quin:

Via MetaFilter.

This famous adagio is commonly attributed to the 18th-century Venetian composer Tomaso Albinoni (1671–1751). In fact it was written in 1958. Musicologist Remo Giazotto said he’d found a fragment of an unfinished Albinoni trio sonata in a Dresden library shortly after World War II and composed a new one-movement work based on two thematic ideas and a figured bass. At most these are Albinoni’s only contributions to the work. In fact Giazotto never produced the manuscript fragment, and no record of its existence has been found in the library records, so it’s conceivable, though far from certain, that Giazotto invented the story of the discovery and in fact composed the whole piece himself.

“Genuine works of art carry their own aesthetic theory implicit within them and suggest the standards according to which they are to be judged.” — Goethe, letter, 1808

Flemish engraver Aegidius Sadeler II based these prints on designs by Pieter Stevens II. Spring:

Summer:

Autumn:

Winter:

One year is sufficient to behold all the magnificence of nature, nay, even one day and night; for more is but the same brought again. This sun, that moon, these stars, the varying dance of the spring, summer, autumn, winter, is that very same which the golden age did see. They which have the longest time lent them to live in, have almost no part of it at all, measuring it either by the space of time which is past, when they were not, or by that which is to come. Why shouldst thou then care whether thy days be many or few, which, when prolonged to the uttermost, prove, paralleled with eternity, as a tear is to the ocean? To die young, is to do that soon, and in some fewer days, which once thou must do; it is but the giving over of a game, that after never so many hazards, must be lost.

— William Drummond of Hawthornden, A Cypress Grove, 1623