Literary Art History Trivia Quiz

Answer: The Agony and the Ecstasy

Author Irving Stone immersed himself in the life of sculptor/painter/architect Michelangelo Buonarroti for several years in order to produce his popular novel, even studying the techniques of stonecutting. Though it takes certain liberties with fact, the book has long been, for many people, their introduction not only to Michelangelo but also to the history and culture of the Italian Renaissance.

Stone is also well-known for "Lust for Life," on Vincent van Gogh, and "Depths of Glory," on Camille Pissarro. The film version of "The Agony and the Ecstasy" starred Charlton Heston, who played Moses, subject of Michelangelo's great work in San Pietro in Vincoli in Rome, in "The Ten Commandments." "L'oeuvre" ("The Masterpiece") is an Emile Zola novel about a painter, inspired by Zola's relationship with Paul Cézanne, while Pierre La Mure's "Moulin Rouge" was based on the life of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Joyce Cary's "The Horse's Mouth" is the story of fictional, down-at-the-heel artist Gulley Jimson, memorably played in a wonderful film adaptation by actor Alec Guinness.

Answer: The Younger Memnon/Ramesses II

Percy Bysshe Shelley's sonnet "Ozymandias" was published in January of 1818, before the fragmented "Younger Memnon" statue of Ramesses II (now in the British Museum) arrived in London that year, but the work had been discussed in early 19th-century Egyptophile and other cultural circles for some time. The title "Ozymandias" was derived from the pharaoh's throne name and the reference to the "king of kings" from an inscription that appeared on the base.

The 2nd-century marble "Townley Vase" in the British Museum may have been one of the inspirations for the "Ode on a Grecian Urn" by John Keats, who probably saw it and admired its Bacchic reliefs at an exhibition of the Elgin Marbles. The "Venus de Milo" figures importantly in Poem 36 in the collection "Trilce," by 20th-century Peruvian poet César Vallejo, while "The Greek Slave" is not an ancient work at all. This once highly-popular figure, based on the "Medici Venus" in the Uffizi was executed by 19th-century American sculptor Hiram Powers and seen in copies throughout the U.S. and Europe. It inspired poems by Elizabeth Barrett Browning and John Greenleaf Whittier.

Answer: Girl with a Pearl Earring

Tracy Chevalier's novel, "Girl with a Pearl Earring," offers creative backstory for the painting, one of the finest of the rare works of 17th-century Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer. The painting is in the Mauritshuis in The Hague. In Chevalier's telling, the sitter was actually a teenage maid in the Vermeer household, and the eponymous earrings belonged to the artist's wife. In fact, we have no idea who the sitter was, but the specificity and individualism of her features make it clear that she was not merely a product of the painter's imagination. The 2003 film of the same name starred Colin Firth as Vermeer and Scarlett Johansson as Griet, the maid.

"Gabrielle Wearing a Necklace" is a work by French Impressionist Pierre Auguste Renoir, while "Lydia in a Loge, Wearing a Pearl Necklace" is a portrait of American Impressionist Mary Cassatt's sister at the theater. (Another painting of Lydia, "Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper," provided the title and inspiration for a 2001 novella by Harriet Scott Chessman.) We don't know who painted "Mozart with a Diamond Ring," purportedly a portrait of the young composer that is owned by the Mozarteum in Salzburg.

Answer: The Moon and Sixpence

W. Somerset Maugham's novel "The Moon and Sixpence" is based on the life of important Post-Impressionist Paul Gauguin. While Maugham's protagonist, Charles Strickland, is English, and Gauguin was French, both the real and the fictional artists worked as stockbrokers before abandoning their professions and their families and becoming painters. Gauguin lived and painted on Tahiti, which Maugham visited in 1916, and ultimately died in poverty in the Marquesas.

Both John Updike's "Seek My Face" and Kate Christensen's "The Great Man" concern the investigations of researchers into the lives of dead artists and their impact on the people they left behind. Updike's novel includes several lightly-veiled portraits of mid-20th-century art-world figures, including Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol. Alison Lurie's witty "The Truth About Lorin Jones" is the fictional story of a museum curator who delves into the life and career of a great woman artist and finds that her sympathetic, feminist conception of her subject doesn't quite correspond to reality.

Answer: Iain Pears

Art historian Iain Pears published his first Jonathan Argyll/Flavia di Stefano novel, "The Raphael Affair," in 1991. He wrote seven more books in the series but has since moved on to rather more ambitious literary efforts, including the critically-successful "An Instance of the Fingerpost." Pears is also the author of a scholarly study, "The Discovery of Painting: The Growth of Interest in the Arts in England, 1680-1768."

Oliver Banks was another art historian who wrote mysteries, while the late Martin Robertson, a distinguished scholar of classical Greek art, was a published poet (and father of the musician Thomas Dolby). Jonathan Gash (aka John Grant) is the author of the popular "Lovejoy" series featuring a roguish antiques dealer. Incidentally, fans of art-world mysteries might also enjoy the series by Nicholas Kilmer, beginning with "Harmony in Flesh and Black."

Answer: The Fall of Icarus

"Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky," as W.H. Auden wrote in his poem, "Musée des Beaux Arts," is the subtle subject of the Brussels "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus," once attributed to 16th-century Netherlandish painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Both Auden and William Carlos Williams, who titled his own poem after the work, were fascinated by the manner in which the ordinary, quotidian lives of the other figures proceed without interruption as the audacious Icarus splashes into the sea, having ignored his father Daedalus's instructions not to fly too close to the sun.

Another myth of some importance to the concept of artistic creation is The Maid of Corinth, first narrated by Pliny the Elder, in which a young woman, about to be parted from her lover, limns his shadow on a wall as he sleeps. This "origin of painting" in love, as described in William Hayley's late 18th-century poetic epistle, "An Essay on Painting," became a popular theme in art and is the subject of "The Origin of Painting" by Joseph Wright of Derby. Pliny's oft-painted story of Alexander the Great's mistress Campaspe, with whom the ancient painter Apelles fell in love, inspired two plays, by John Lely and Pedro Calderón, while the tale of Apollo and Daphne, as elegantly presented by the poet Ovid, has been illustrated by countless artists, perhaps most notably Roman Baroque sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini.

Answer: Giulio Romano

"That rare Italian master Julio Romano; who, had he himself eternity and could put breath into his work, would beguile Nature of her custom, so perfectly he is her ape." Thus is Shakespeare's description of Giulio, in "The Winter's Tale" (V,ii), where he is said to have sculpted a likeness of Queen Hermione, the heroine Perdita's mother.

Precisely how the playwright came to learn of the artist, who died in 1546, is unknown; the play was probably written in 1610-11, but the art collection of the Gonzaga family, which had employed Giulio, was not purchased by the royal Stuarts until the 1620s. Moreover, while Giulio is known to have designed tombs and temporary structures executed by others, sculpture is not a medium in which he is thought to have worked. Andrea del Sarto is the speaker in Robert Browning's dramatic monologue, titled after the Florentine painter and source of the striking lines, "Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp/Or what's a heaven for?" -- a fitting epitaph for any artist.

The works of Parmigianino and Caravaggio inspired 20th-century poems, the former's unusual self-portrait in Vienna being the subject of John Ashbery's "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror," and the latter's "The Conversion of Paul on the Way to Damascus" having given us Thom Gunn's rather cynical "In Santa Maria del Popolo."

Answer: Robertson Davies

The brilliant Canadian novelist and playwright Robertson Davies produced other multi-volume works, but the "Cornish Trilogy" will be of the greatest interest to anyone looking for fictional (and cleverly satirical) treatments of the art world, academia, and cultural philanthropy. "The Rebel Angels," regarded by some critics as Davies' finest novel, concerns the immediate aftermath of the death of painter/patron Francis Cornish and the provisions of his last will and testament. "What's Bred in the Bone" is a novel about Cornish's life, and "The Lyre of Orpheus" follows the attempts of the Cornish Foundation to see a funding project to completion.

Canadian writers Margaret Atwood and Mordecai Richler also produced art-themed novels: Atwood's "Cat's Eye" concerns a woman artist, and Richler's first novel, "The Acrobats," is the story of a Canadian artist in Spain. Wyndham Lewis, an Englishman claimed by the Canadians owing to his purported birth on a yacht off of Nova Scotia, is best-known as a painter and founder of the Vorticist movement, but he also wrote novels, including a trilogy -- "The Human Age" -- of his own.

Answer: Headlong

Michael Frayn is famous for his plays, "Copenhagen" and "Noises Off" among them, but he has also published several novels. In the farcical but art-historically informative "Headlong," the protagonist, Martin Clay, believes that he has located the missing 6th painting from Peter Bruegel the Elder's series "The Months" (now divided between Vienna, New York, and Prague) and becomes determined both to verify his hunch and somehow pry the work from the hands of its ignorant owner.

"The Flanders Panel" is Spaniard Arturo Pérez-Reverte's intricate novel concerning a mystery encoded in a 15th-century painting of a chess game, while "Girl in Hyacinth Blue," by Susan Vreeland, chronicles the long history and provenance of a fictional painting by Vermeer. "The Modigliani Scandal," which also involves a lost work of art, is an early novel originally published under a nom de plume by thriller-writer Ken Follett, who has more recently explored the building history of a medieval cathedral in "The Pillars of the Earth" and "World Without End".

Answer: Anita Brookner

English novelist Anita Brookner earned her PhD in Art History from the Courtauld Institute of Art, one of the world's premier centers for the study of the subject, in 1953. In 1967, she was appointed the first female Slade Professor of Art at Cambridge University. Having written books on Ingres, David, and Jean-Baptiste Greuze, among other artists, Brookner turned to fiction and in 1981 published her first novel, the aptly-titled "A Start in Life," in which, to her credit, she resisted the temptation to make her protagonist an art historian. Her fourth novel, "Hotel du Lac" (1984), won the Booker Prize.

Marina Warner is an English cultural historian and novelist whose non-fiction books frequently examine art in the context of wider social themes, and Australian scholar/feminist Germaine Greer published "The Obstacle Race: The Fortunes of Women Painters and Their Work" in 1979, at a time when many female painters and sculptors were still languishing in obscurity. A.S. Byatt (sister of writer Margaret Drabble) is best-known for her literary novel "Possession," but her "Matisse Stories" explore her characters' lives via three paintings by Henri Matisse.