During Renaissance and particularly in 1500s artistic painting was not considered a suitable occupation for a gentleman. Since painting involved
working with hands, artists were considered craftsmen and were given the same social standing as tailors or shoemakers
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Michelangelo Buonarroti's father Lodovico was horrified when he found out that Michelangelo decided to become an artist. Michelangelo was often beaten
by his father and uncles when he first began to draw. Lodovico was proud of his ancestry and he worried that an artist in the family will bring the family a
disgrace
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The Renaissance masterpiece "The Pieta" is the only work that
Michelangelo Buonarroti ever signed. He later regretted what he considered
an outburst of pride and vowed to never sign another work again. The Pieta is
housed at St. Peter Basilica in Vatican City
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Pablo Picasso was baptized Pablo Diego José Fransisco de Paula Juan
Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Martyr
Patricio Clito Ruiz y Picasso. The name contains 23 words and honors
various saints and relatives
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Leonardo Da Vinci started painting Mona Lisa in 1504 or 1505 and finished
only shortly before he died in 1519. Some reports say that it took him 10 years
to perfect Mona Lisa's lips. He was a procrastinator and often regretted not
finishing many of his works
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Vincent shot himself in a wheatfield in Auvers, France but did not die until 2 days later at the age of 37.
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Van Gogh suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy as well as other mental and physical conditions.
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Vincent’s brother’s wife collected Vincent’s paintings and letters after his death and dedicated herself to getting his work the recognition it deserved
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In a short period of ten years Van Gogh made approximately 900 paintings.
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Vincent only sold one painting during his lifetime and only became famous after his death
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Van Gogh created his most famous work The Starry Night while staying in an asylum in Saint-Remy-de-Provence, France.
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Van Gogh wrote over 800 letters in his lifetime. The majority of them written to his brother and closest friend Theo.
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After much disagreement by art historians, it is now accepted that Jan Van Eyck had an older brother, Pictor Hubertus Eyck (Hubert), who worked with Jan on "Adoration of the Lamb".
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Artist Edgar Degas was so fascinated with ballet dancers that he became obsessed with representing them in his art. It is estimated Degas made approximately 1500 paintings, pastels, prints and drawings of dancers
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There was an art movement called Pop Art. In the mid-1950's through to the early 1960's an art movement called Pop Art celebrated images from popular culture, advertising and the mass media. Exponents of Pop Art employed collage, air-brush and other techniques sometimes duplicating commercial silk-screen effects by hand. Artists such as Warhol and Lichtenstein took their subjects from popular American culture. Warhol's '100 Cans of Campbell's Soup' and his repeated images of Marilyn Monroe are some of the most well known artworks to emerge from this movement.
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The word 'cartoon' originally comes from painting terminology. The term 'cartoon' relates to a preliminary, but fully worked, sketch from which the outlines could be transferred to be the basis of a design for a fresco or painting.
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John James Audubon painted 435 watercolors of birds in his life time. He was born on the Caribbean island of Santo Domingo in 1784. In 1802 he moved to the United states where he fell in love with the bird life and made it his life's work to paint a picture of every species of bird in America.
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Oil paintings generally cost less to frame than equally sized prints.
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On 3rd December 1961 Henri Matisse's painting Le Bateau was put the right way up after hanging upside-down for 46 days without anyone noticing at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, America
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Roman statues were made with detachable heads, so that one head could be removed and replaced by another.