Is the Mona Lisa really “ten times better than every other painting”? No one seriously believes this, and how would anyone measure such a thing? There may be no such critical scale, but there is a popular one. The Louvre, where the famous Leonardo da Vinci—maybe the most famous painting of all time—hangs, says that 80 percent of its visitors come just to see the Mona Lisa. Her enigmatic smile adorns merchandise the world wide. Books, essays, documentaries, songs, coffee mugs—hers may be the most recognizable face in Western art.
Learn in the Vox video above, however, how that fame came about as the result of a different kind of publicity—coverage of the Mona Lisa theft in 1911. It became an overnight sensation. “Before its theft,” notes NPR, “the ‘Mona Lisa’ was not widely known outside the art world. Leonardo da Vinci painted it in 1507, but it wasn’t until the 1860s that critics began to hail it as a masterwork of Renaissance painting. And that judgment didn’t filter outside a thin slice of French intelligentsia.”
Though the painting once hung in the bedroom of Napoleon, in the 19th century, it “wasn’t even the most famous painting in its gallery, let alone in the Louvre,” historian James Zug tells All Things Considered. Writing at Vox, Phil Edwards describes how an essay by Victorian art critic Walter Pater elevated the Mona Lisa among art critics and intellectuals like Oscar Wilde. His overwrought prose “popped up in guidebooks to the Louvre and reading clubs in Paducah.” Yet it was not art criticism that sold the painting to the general public. It was the intrigue of an art heist.
In 1911, an Italian construction worker, Vincenzo Perugia, was working for the firm Cobier, engaged in putting several paintings, including the Mona Lisa, under glass. While at the Louvre, he hatched a plan to steal the painting with two accomplices, brothers Vincenzo and Michele Lancelotti. The crime was literally notorious overnight. The theft occurred on Monday morning, August 21. By late Tuesday, the story had been picked up by major newspapers all over the world.
Pablo Picasso and poet Guillaume Apollinaire went on trial for the theft (their case was dismissed). Conspiracy theories popped up all over the place, claiming, as per usual, that the whole thing was a hoax or a distraction engineered by the French government. “Wanted posters for the painting appeared on Parisian walls,” Zug writes at Smithsonian. “Crowds massed at police headquarters. Thousands of spectators, including Franz Kafka, flooded the Salon Carré when the Louvre reopened after a week to stare at the empty wall with its four lonely iron hooks.”
Once the painting was restored, the crowds kept coming. Newspaper photos and police posters gave way to t‑shirts and mousepads. The painting’s undoubted excellence seemed incidental; it became, like Andy Warhol’s soup cans, famous for being famous. Learn more about the Mona Lisa’s long strange trip through history in the short Great Big Story video above.
No special occasion is required to celebrate Leonardo da Vinci, but the fact that he died in 1519 makes this year a particularly suitable time to look back at his vast, innovative, and influential body of work. Just last month, “Leonardo da Vinci: A Life in Drawing” opened in twelve museums across the United Kingdom. “144 of Leonardo da Vinci’s greatest drawings in the Royal Collection are displayed in 12 simultaneous exhibitions across the UK,” says the exhibition’s site, with each venue’s drawings “selected to reflect the full range of Leonardo’s interests – painting, sculpture, architecture, music, anatomy, engineering, cartography, geology and botany.”
The Royal Collection Trust, writes Artnet’s Sarah Cascone, has even “sent a dozen drawings from Windsor Castle to each of the 12 participating institutions.” They’d previously been in Windsor Castle’s Print Room, the home of a collection of old master prints and drawings routinely described as one of the finest in the world.
Now displayed at institutions like Liverpool’s Walker Art Gallery, Sheffield’s Millennium Gallery, Belfast’s Ulster Museum, and Cardiff’s National Museum Wales, this selection of Leonardo’s drawings will be much more accessible to the public during the exhibition than before.
But the Royal Mail has made sure that the drawings will be even more widely seen, doing its part for the 500th anniversary of Leonardo’s death by issuing them in stamp form.
“The stamps depict several well-known works,” writes Artnet’s Kate Brown, “such as The skull sectioned (1489) and The head of Leda (1505–08), a study for his eventual painting of the myth of Leda, the queen of Sparta, which was the most valuable work in Leonardo’s estate when he died and was apparently destroyed around 1700. Other stamps show the artist’s studies of skeletons, joints, and cats.”
While none of these images enjoy quite the cultural profile of a Vitruvian Man, let alone a Mona Lisa, they all show that whatever Leonardo drew, he drew it in a way revealing that he saw it like no one else did (possibly due in part, as we’ve previously posted about here on Open Culture, to an eye disorder).
Though that may come across more clearly at the scale of the originals than at the scale of postage stamps, even a glimpse at the intellectually boundless Renaissance polymath’s drawings compressed into 21-by-24-millimeter squares will surely be enough to draw many into his still-inspirational artistic and scientific world. To the intrigued, may we suggest plunging into his 570 pages of notebooks?
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
I think you’re absolutely allowed several minutes, possibly even half a day to feel very, very sorry for yourself indeed. And then just start making art. — Neil Gaiman
It’s a bit early in the year for commencement speeches, but fortunately for lifelong learners who rely on a steady drip of inspiration and encouragement, author Neil Gaiman excels at putting old wine in new bottles.
The above video captures the frequent collaborators appearing together last fall at the East London cultural center Evolutionary Arts Hackney in a fundraiser for English PEN, the founding branch of the worldwide literary defense association. While Gaiman reads aloud in his affable, ever-engaging style, Riddell uses a brush pen to bang out 4 3/4 line drawings, riffing on Gaiman’s metaphors.
While the art-making “rules” Gaiman enumerates herein have been extrapolated and widely disseminated (including, never fear, below), it’s worth having a look at why this event called for a live illustrator.
Leaving aside the fact that each ticket purchaser got a copy of Art Matters, autographed by both men, and a large signed print was auctioned off on behalf of English PEN, Gaiman holds illustrations in high regard.
…a good illustrator, for me, is like going to see a play. You are going to get something brought to life for you by a specific cast in a specific place. That way of illustrating will never happen again. You know, somebody else could illustrate it—there are hundreds of different Alice in Wonderlands.
Which we could certainly take to mean that if Riddell’s style doesn’t grab you the way it grabs Gaiman (and the juries for several prestigious awards) perhaps you should tear your eyes away from the screen and illustrate what you hear in the speech.
Do you need to know how to draw as well as he does? The rules, below, suggest not. We’d love to take a peek inside your sketchbook after.
Embrace the fact that you’re young. Accept that you don’t know what you’re doing. And don’t listen to anyone who says there are rules and limits.
If you know your calling, go there. Stay on track. Keep moving towards it, even if the process takes time and requires sacrifice.
Learn to accept failure. Know that things will go wrong. Then, when things go right, you’ll probably feel like a fraud. It’s normal.
Make mistakes, glorious and fantastic ones. It means that you’re out there doing and trying things.
When life gets hard, as it inevitably will, make good art. Just make good art.
Make your own art, meaning the art that reflects your individuality and personal vision.
You get freelance work if your work is good, if you’re easy to get along with, and if you’re on deadline. Actually you don’t need all three. Just two.
Enjoy the ride. Don’t fret it all away. (That one comes compliments of Stephen King.)
Be wise and accomplish things in your career. If you have problems getting started, pretend you’re someone who is wise, who can get things done. It will help you along.
Leave the world more interesting than it was before.
The internet has become an essential back up system for thousands of pieces of historical art, science, and literature, and also for a specialized kind of text incorporating them all in degrees: the illustrated natural science book, from the golden ages of book illustration and philosophical naturalism in Europe and the Americas. We’ve seen some fine digital reproductions of the illustrated Nomenclature of Colors by Abraham Gottlob Werner, for example—a book that accompanied Darwin on his Beagle voyage.
Above and below, you can see just a fraction of the illustrations from another example of a remarkable illustrated scientific book, also by a woman on the edge of being forgotten: Nancy Anne Kingsbury Wollstonecraft’s 1826 Specimens of the Plants and Fruits of the Island of Cuba.
This study of Cuban plant life might never have seen the light of day were it not for the new online edition from the HathiTrust digital library, “by way of Cornell University’s Library Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections,” notes Atlas Obscura. The book is notable for more than its obscurity, however. It is, says scholar of Cuban history and culture Emilio Cueto, “the most important corpus of plant illustrations in Cuba’s colonial history.” Its author first began work when she moved to the island after her husband, Charles Wollstonecraft (brother of Mary and uncle of Mary Shelley) died in 1817.
She began documenting the plant life in the region of Matanzas through the 1820s. That research became Specimens of the Plants and Fruits of the Island of Cuba, a meticulous study, full of Wollstonecraft’s vibrant, striking watercolors. After making several attempts at publication, she died in 1828, and the manuscript never appeared in public. Now, almost two centuries later, all three volumes are available to read online and download in PDF. They had been dormant at the Cornell University Library, and few people knew very much about them. Cueto, the scholar most familiar with the manuscript’s place in history, had himself searched for it for 20 years before finding it hidden away at Cornell in 2018.
Now it is freely available to anyone and everyone online, part of an expanding, shared online archive of fascinating works by non-professional scientists and mathematicians whose work was painstakingly interpreted by artists for the benefit of a lay readership. In the case of Wollstonecraft, as with Goethe and many other contemporary scholar-artists, we have the two in one. View and download her 220-page work, with its 121 illustrated plates at the HathiTrust Digital Library.
One can only color so many floral-trimmed affirmations before one begins to crave something slightly more perverse. An emaciated, naked, anthropomorphized mandrake root, say or…
Since 2016, the Academy has made an annual practice of inviting other libraries, archives, and cultural institutions around the world to upload PDF coloring pages based on their collections for the public’s free download.
Those who need something more complex will appreciate the intricate maps of the Lithuanian Art Museum’s coloring book. Coloring Franz Hogenberg’s 1581 map of Vilnius is the emotional equivalent of walking the labyrinth for god knows how many hours.
As befits a content website-cum-digital-National-Library, the Memoria Chilena Coloring Book 2019 has something for every taste: flayed anatomical studies, 1940’s fashions, curious kitty cats, and a heaping helping of jesters.
The undisputed last great master of ukiyo‑e was Utagawa Hiroshige. He is best known for the many series he created of bucolic landscapes, which offered collectors a chance to see parts of Japan they might never reach. The Japan of his early 19th century work holds a special place in Japanese hearts–a final look at an isolated and beautiful country just before the opening up of the ports to the West and, with it, industrialization.
Apart from Mount Fuji, the locations that Hiroshige drew have long gone, but “Computer science undergrad, martial artist, ukiyo‑e lover” and British resident George–he goes by the Twitter handle @Cascadesssss–has plotted the location of Hiroshige’s prints on an interactive Google map that has gone quickly viral.
The red circles represent the series “One Hundred Famous Views of Edo,” the blue circles “The Fifty-Three Stations of the Tokaido” (one of five main routes in Edo Japan), and the green “Famous Views of the Sixty-odd Provinces,” the most expansive series showing scenes all the way from the The Two-sword Rocks of Bo Bay to the north province of Dewa and Mount Gassan. Each location opens to a separate web page with location information, including latitude-longitude numbers. (Pull up a chair map-lovers, you might be here a long time.)
“The Fifty-Three Stations of the Tokaido” was Hiroshige’s most popular series and unlike the other two depicted horizontal landscapes. The artist sketched these in 1832 as he rode in a procession from Edo (now Tokyo) to Kyoto and set to work on the prints once he returned home. The 55 prints (two extra drawings of the starting and ending points of the journey) sold like crazy, as they cost about the same as a bowl of soup for the common person.
“Famous Views of the Sixty-odd Provinces” is different in that Hiroshige did not make trips to see all these beloved locations–instead he put his own spin on existing drawings found in guide books and other sources. The total series of 70 prints took four years to complete, from 1853 to 1856.
By the time the “Provinces” series was winding down, Hiroshige started work on his final series “One Hundred Famous Views of Edo,” which he worked on until his death. Again, though living in Edo, Hiroshige drew from the works of others from decades before. This is also the artist at his most adventurous–some landscapes are obscured by posts and bridge railings or even a carp streamer. One features what is rumored to be Hiroshige’s favorite geisha. These prints would go on to influence Western artists, especially Vincent van Gogh.
Hiroshige produced more series over his life–he died aged 61–and here’s hoping Cascadesssss plots more on his map soon.
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
Whatever Hippocrates meant when he said “art is long, life is short,” we usually take the saying to illustrate one indisputable medical truth and one more philosophical: everyone dies, but art lives for hundreds, thousands, of years—and may in some sense be a kind of immortality for the artist. This was probably what Salvador Dalí meant when he said, “Si muero, no muero por todo”—“If I die, I won’t completely die.” But maybe he knew he’d return one day in another form as well.
What if artists could go on living forever alongside their work? Or be called up any time we want to have a conversation. Long a staple of science fiction, hologram technology can now bring back famous pop stars, to varying degrees of uncanniness. It has not, until now, summoned a deceased famous artist. But as long as there’s an extensive audio-visual record with which to reconstruct the celebrated dead, it can be done, and now it has. You can see the results yourself in the video trailers here.
Among modern artists, only Andy Warhol left a more complete record of his public persona. The hologram Dalí—according to a press release from Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, who will debut him in person, so to speak, this coming April—comes alive through the work of an algorithm that maps information culled from “hundreds of interviews, quotes, and existing archival footage” onto the body of an actor of similar size and build. Dalí’s conversation is not spontaneous but constructed from his own writings and reenacted. It’s not the stuff of Star Trek yet, but maybe a significant step in that direction.
“Greetings,” purrs Dalí in the trailer at the top, from the Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida. “I am Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech. And I am back.” Visitors to the Dalí Museum will see the ersatz Dalí in “Dalí Lives” and “experience his bigger-than-life personality in an up close and personal way.” Will they truly “get the unique opportunity to learn more about Salvador Dalí’s life and work from the person who knew him best: Dalí himself”? Will they feel like it’s worth the price of the ticket, at least?
It certainly seems convincing. If you had told me these clips came from actual interview footage, I might have believed you. Except for the part about him returning from the dead after 30 years. If, however, it were possible to really bring Dalí’s consciousness back online, I doubt he’d be particularly surprised. Though he confesses his fear of death in the short video above, he also tells us, “I do not believe in my death.” Or as he once said elsewhere, “I believe in general death but not the death of Dalí absolutely not. I believe in my death becoming almost impossible.” Or as he might also have put it, “art is long, and so am I.”
What possessed the man who attacked Rembrandt’s The Night Watchwith a bread knife in 1975, “jabbing two-foot-long knife marks into the surface,” as Nina Siegal writes at The New York Times, “cutting a seven-foot-wide hole, and ripping off a section of the canvas”? This was not the first time the painting had been mangled. In 1715, just a little over 70 years after the monumental work’s 1642 completion, the Amsterdam city government decided to move it, and removed a significant part to shrink it down for easier transport. The missing top and left portions have never been recovered.
It survived intact for two centuries then faced its first knife attack in 1911. Then it survived two World Wars only to endure the second attack. Then, in 1990, it was set upon by a man armed with sulphuric acid.
You can read or hear the painting’s history in Dutch or English, learn the names of the historical figures depicted in it, learn about Rembrandt’s command of composition and chiaroscuro, and much more. (Enter the interactive documentary here.) The painter’s masterful, dramatic use of light and shadow to create a sense of depth—probably the most famous example of his use of the technique—is responsible for the painting’s usual title, since most of its viewers have assumed that the assembled volunteer militia depicted in it came together in the dead of night. (The shadows had darkened considerably over the years until a thick layer of varnish was removed in the 1940s.)
But Rembrandt’s masterpiece was originally called Militia Company of District II under the Command of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq, and it records not a troop of seasoned soldiers but a gentleman’s shooting company, one of the bands of civic guards that had “effectively developed into a social club for well-to-do citizens” who would “turn up mostly as ceremonies or to quell minor riots.” Each of the men memorialized paid to have his likeness included. We may never have known their names except that in 1715 they were added inside a shield painted by an anonymous artist for some reason. The work is full of other such mysteries.
Who is the small girl in white, bathed in angelic light, to whom our eyes are inevitably drawn? “She does not have any traceable identity,” our narrator tells us, “she is Rembrandt’s invention,” a symbol of the company. And yet behind her, almost completely shrouded, is another girl, identity unknown, who most of us would probably never have noticed had she not been pointed out. “In The Night Watch,” we discover, “nothing is what it seems.”
Learn more of the painting’s secrets at the online documentary project here, see similarly interactive art histories from NTR on M.C. Escher and Hieronymus Bosch, and, above, listen to an Artsy podcast featuring Rijksmuseum curator Pieter Roelofs and other Rembrandt experts who explain what makes The Night Watch so wildly famous that more than one person has felt driven to destroy it.
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