Arty Allsorts (A Bit Easy) Trivia Quiz

Answer: Ancient Greece and Rome

Italian Renaissance writers did indeed despise their IMMEDIATE forebears: they coined the term "Gothic" for what they called this "barbarous" and "uncouth" art, which never really took off in Italy anyway. They wanted to get back to what they saw as the classical simplicity and purity of ancient Greece and Rome. Architects returned to solid walls, rounded arches and classical columns in place of the windows and pointed arches of the last few centuries.

As far as sculpture goes, Michelangelo's "Bacchus" and "Pieta" were considered by his contemporaries to surpass any contemporary and to rival the ancient Greeks on whom their works were modelled, and his "David" to surpass even them.

Answer: Architect, sculptor and painter

According to writer Robert Campbell: "America's other great artists -- our painters, sculptors, composers - don't really rank with the tops of all time. They're not Rembrandt or Michelangelo or Beethoven. Wright alone has that standing." If you have a living room, a carport or an open plan house, you own an architectural invention by Wright (1867-1959). He virtually created a distinctively American architecture characterised by wide spaces. Some consider him the greatest architect who ever lived. Arguably his best creation is the house called Fallingwater (http://www.wam.umd.edu/~stwright/frank-lloyd-wright/fallingwater.html)

Moore (1898-1968) is generally recognised as the greatest British twentieth century sculptor. His females echo the shapes of landscape features such as mountains, and his influence thus extends even beyond sculpture, to landscape painting.

Pollock (1912-1956) is usually accepted as one of the leading abstract expressionist painters. He is especially famous for pouring and otherwise applying the paint directly onto huge canvasses, which he did in the early 1950s; "Blue Poles" and "Lavender Mist" are well-known examples.

Answer: Perspective

Perspective "maps" the space in a painting, and allows the illusion that solid objects are precisely placed in that space. Paolo Toscanelli, the great mathematician, quite probably helped Brunelleschi to make the first perspective painting in history, of the Baptistry in Florence; a few years later, in 1426, Masaccio painted the first surviving one, a fresco depicting the Trinity on a church wall in Florence, in which a painted arch looks real when viewed from the correct point (http://keptar.demasz.hu/arthp/html/m/masaccio/trinity/). This device was used on the ceilings of Baroque churches to dissolve the stone into a vision of heaven. Check out http://www.stuardtclarkesrome.com/loyola.html for Pozzo's effort on the ceiling of Sant'Ignazio di Loyola. He set a stone in the floor at the exact point at which you need to stand to make the perspective effect happen when you look up. (Oil painting was a great advance, too, of course, but as far as I'm aware it didn't make any material difference to Columbus.)

Apparently the ancient writer Ptolemy (85-165AD) also knew about linear perspective, but used it only for mapping and stage designs.

Perspective ruled OK in painting for another few centuries until people started screwing around with it at the turn of the twentieth century. Check out http://www.sanford-artedventures.com/study/images/vg_bedroom_l.jpg for van Gogh's take on the technique.

As for the New World bit: Columbus is said to have used a map of the world, drawn by Toscanelli using his principles of perspective, to get to the Americas.

Answer: Physical images

The first abstract painter is usually accepted as Vasily Kandinsky (1866-1944) - who, interestingly, was a close friend of Arnold Schoenberg, the composer who was instituting a revolution in music at the same time, replacing major/minor keys with a system in which all twelve tones are treated as being of equal importance. (Schoenberg was also a keen amateur painter, doubtless influenced by his friend Kandinsky.)

Answer: The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa

No trick here: the Christian sculpture is the post-ancient one. The Ecstasy, by Bernini (1598-1680), is a miracle in itself (well, I think so, anyway!). See http://www.thais.it/scultura/bernini.htm for his sculptures. As far as I'm aware, we don't know the names of any ancient Greek and Roman sculptors. For the head of Augustus, see http://mandarb.net/virtual_gallery/sculptures.shtml; for the Laocoon group see http://www.bluffton.edu/~sullivanm/laocoon/laocoon.html; and for the Belvedere Apollo see http://www.artchive.com/artchive/G/greek/belvedere_apollo.jpg.html

[I've subsequently been informed by Deedee that we jolly well DO know the names of at least some ancient sculptors. Check out http://ancienthistory.about.com/library/weekly/aa6gkartists.htm; the name Praxiteles features prominently in the history of ancient Greek sculpture.]

Answer: Whistler's Mother

In 1871, when James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) couldn't find a model, he asked his mother to pose. He had great trouble getting the result just right. Judge for yourself at http://www.4reference.net/encyclopedias/wikipedia/Whistler_s_Mother.html. (He was fond of musical titles like "arrangement" and "harmony" for his paintings.

He said: "As music is the poetry of sound, so is painting the poetry of sight, and subject matter has nothing to do with harmony of sound or colour.")

Answer: A huge glass pyramid

Ieoh Ming Pei, the Chinese-American architect, was responsible for this controversial part of the Louvre's modernisation project. See it at http://www.louvre.fr/img/photos/palais/ipyrami.jpg. Apparently you can get used to it quite quickly - so they say!

Answer: Leonardo's "la Gioconda"

...better known as the "Mona Lisa", the one with that infuriatingly enigmatic smile.

How did an Italian painting wind up in a French museum? Easy: Leonardo sold it to the French King Francis I. Check out http://www.beckett.com/celebriducks/mona_lisa/index.asp for the Mona Lisa's subsequent history.

Who was she? It is traditionally accepted, and has been recently reinforced by Prof. Giuseppe Pallanti, that the model for the work was Lisa Gherardini, born in Florence in 1479, wife of Francesco del Giocondo, a client of Lisa's father. However, the above website presents an intriguing theory that the Mona Lisa was a SELF-portrait! This theory supposedly accounts for the two facts that there are no records of sittings for the painting and that the work wasn't sold to the man who allegedly commissioned it.

Answer: Monet

Claude Monet (1840-1926) gave the impressionist movement in France its name, from his "Impression, Sunrise" of 1873. His work culminated with the "Water Lily" series, the subject being an extensively developed pond in his own yard. He painted the pond 48 times, seeking to reflect different lighting conditions produced by the various times of day and weather conditions. The series was exhibited in 1909 and then broken up.

Edouard Manet (1832-1883) is generally regarded as being the first modernist painter. For three of his works, as well as an explanation of the term "modernism", see http://witcombe.sbc.edu/modernism/roots.html. Another of Manet's famous works is "A Bar at the Folies-Bergere", http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/portrait/story/0,11109,739736,00.html, which includes a possible self-portrait in the mirror.

Answer: The Spanish Civil War

For two and a quarter hours in the late afternoon of 26th April 1937, bombers of the German Condor Legion and the Italian air force devastated Guernica, the capital of the Basque region of Spain, with 22 tons of high explosive bombs and incendiaries as well as strafing attacks by fighters on fleeing civilians, destroying three quarters of the town in a firestorm and killing a generally accepted total of 1,500 (although estimates range from 120 to 10,000). The attack was apparently to terrorise the population and demoralise the Republicans, whose elected government Franco's Nationalists (with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy as allies) were fighting to overthrow. Thanks to the presence of journalists in the town the attack created an international furor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Guernica).

At that time, Picasso was unsuccessfully searching for an idea to fulfil a commission to paint a mural as the centrepiece of the Spanish Pavilion at the 1937 World Fair in Paris. As soon as he heard news of the attack and saw the photographs, the outraged Picasso rushed to his studio and executed the painting.

Its first reception ranged from cool to critical, but it became accepted as the definitive anti-war visual image. It toured around the world except Spain; Picasso refused to let it visit his homeland until the Spanish people enjoyed "public liberties and democratic institutions". With Franco's death in 1975, Spain transformed itself into a constitutional monarchy, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York finally agreed, under international pressure, to give up the painting in 1981. It is now on display in Madrid. (http://www.pbs.org/treasuresoftheworld/a_nav/guernica_nav/main_guerfrm.html and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guernica#The_painting.)