Pictures of a City Trivia Quiz

Answer: Vittore Carpaccio

Also known as "The Healing of the Madman", Vittore Carpaccio's "The Miracle of the Cross at the Ponte di Rialto" - executed around 1496 - is part of a series of nine large canvasses depicting miracles worked by a fragment of the True Cross. These paintings (most of which have survived) were commissioned by the Scuola Grande di San Giovanni Evangelista, a Venetian confraternity, to some prominent artists of the late 15th century. In Carpaccio's work, the titular miracle becomes almost a secondary detail, as it is depicted in the upper left corner of the canvas. Most of the painting is taken up by a very realistic "veduta" (view) of the Canal Grande, lined by buildings and spanned by the wooden bridge that was replaced by the current stone structure in the late 16th century. The inverted cone chimneys, common in medieval Venice, are an intriguingly authentic detail. The painting is now housed in the Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice's most important art museum.

Carpaccio, a dish of raw beef sliced paper-thin, was created in 1950 by Giuseppe Cipriani, the owner of Venice's legendary Harry's Bar, who also created the famous Bellini cocktail. Cipriani named the dish after the Venetian painter because the red colour of the raw meat reminded him of the gorgeous shades of red in Carpaccio's work.

The three artists listed as wrong answers were all from Venice: Bellini was a contemporary of Carpaccio, while Tintoretto and Veronese were active later in the 16th century.

Answer: Nuremberg

Albrecht Dürer created this "View of Nuremberg", the city where he had been born in 1471, after his return from his first trip to Italy, in 1497. During his stay in the country, he studied advanced artistic techniques, and experimented with watercolours; prominent Venetian painters such as Giovanni Bellini and Andrea Mantegna became a major influence on his later work. In this view of his hometown, painted in watercolour and tempera, Dürer focused on colour harmonization - employing a palette of soft, muted shades of green, brown and tan - rather than the painstaking detail that characterizes his later work. In this low-key rendering of the cityscape, the buildings - such as the Imperial Castle and the city walls - blend seamlessly with nature.

The name of the city, together with the artist's initials, can be seen in the upper central part of the painting, which is part of the collection of the Kunsthalle in Bremen - which, like Frankfurt and Stuttgart, is a German city not located in Bavaria.

Answer: Mannerism

Painted in the late 1590s, "View of Toledo" (now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York) is one of the two surviving landscape paintings by El Greco, both of them depictions of the Spanish city where the artist (born in Crete as Domenikos Theotokopoulos) made his home from 1577 to his death in 1614. Some art critics consider this work one of El Greco's masterpieces, particularly on account of his unique depiction of the sky, whose cool shades of blue and grey vividly streaked with white contrast with the vibrant greens of the landscape, and echo the darker grey of the city's buildings. One of the earliest examples of landscape painting in Spanish art, "View of Toledo" showcases El Greco's innovative approach, which influenced 20th-century artistic movements such as Expressionism and Cubism.

Because of some of the distinguishing features of his art, El Greco has been often associated with Mannerism, the style that emerged in the mid-16th century in contrast with the High Renaissance - characterized by odd, often twisted proportions, elongated figures, and the use of idiosyncratic colour schemes. The artistic movements listed as incorrect answers developed between the late 18th and the early 20th centuries.

Answer: Johannes Vermeer

Although much of Johannes Vermeer's fame rests with his intimate portrayals of women in domestic interiors (such as "The Milkmaid" or "Woman Reading a Letter"), this "View of Delft", dating from 1660-1661, shows that he was also an accomplished painter of cityscapes. Another painting of Delft, known as "The Little Street", has survived, while a third, "House Standing in Delft", has been lost. The city is viewed from an elevated position - probably the upper floor of a house - across the river Schie; its buildings (most of which do not exist any longer) are reflected in the water. The level of detail in the work suggests that Vermeer used some kind of optical device (such as a camera obscura) to help him in the execution of the painting. "View of Delft" has been held in the Royal Cabinet of Paintings of the Mauritshuis (The Hague) since 1822, the year in which the collection was established.

Though all the painters mentioned as incorrect answers were also active in the 17th century, Rubens was Flemish rather than Dutch.

Answer: Westminster

The son of a painter, Giovanni Antonio Canal, known as Canaletto ("little Canal"), became renowned for his beautifully detailed "vedute" of Venice - many of them painted directly from nature - in his early 20s. As many of his works were sold to Englishmen on the Grand Tour, in 1746 Canaletto moved to London to be closer to his main market. He remained in England until 1755; most of that time was spent in London, where he produced a number of views of the city, such as the one in the photo. While the work he produced in England is generally considered inferior to his earlier Venice paintings, this view of London is undoubtedly a striking composition. The city is shown at the hour of sunset, framed by the huge arch of the bridge, which at the time the work was executed (1747) had not been yet completed; the bulk of St Paul's Cathedral can be clearly seen on the right. The painting is part of a private collection.

The bridges listed as wrong answers were all built in the 19th century. The current, cast-iron Westminster Bridge replaced the 18th-century structure (opened in 1750) in 1862. The question references William Wordsworth's well-known sonnet "Composed on Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802", which describes the city in the early morning hours.

Answer: Edward Lear

Though most people would associate Edward Lear with his numerous limericks, or with nonsense poems such as "The Owl and the Pussycat", the English author was also a prolific visual artist. Besides his work as an illustrator, specialized in drawings of plants and birds, he produced an extensive body of oil and watercolour paintings based on sketches he took during his travels. In particular, his repeated visits to Italy inspired much of his best work as an artist. The painting in the photo, which belongs to the Yale Center for British Art, dates from 1840, and depicts the "Temple of Venus and Rome" in the Roman Forum. Like most of Lear's landscapes, the view is characterized by strong sunlight that emphasizes colour contrasts: the mellow, reddish-tan hue of the buildings is framed by the hazy blue of the sky and the vivid green of the trees and the grass.

The building next to the ruins of the temple is the Basilica of Santa Francesca Romana, originally built in the 9th century.

Answer: ukiyo-e

The "floating world" to which the name "ukiyo-e" refers is the hedonistic lifestyle embodied by beautiful women and various forms of entertainment. However, unlike other prominent artists of the Edo period (1603-1868), Utagawa Hiroshige was mostly concerned with the depiction of flora, fauna and landscapes. His best-known works are two series of woodcut prints, "The Fifty-Three Stations of the Tōkaidō" (1833-1834), in horizontal format, and "One Hundred Famous Views of Edo" (1856-1859), in vertical format. For the latter series, Hiroshige was inspired by an illustrated guidebook of the city of Edo (now Tokyo): however, in addition to heritage sites such as temples and shrines, in his work the artist described places such as stores, restaurants and theatres.

The print in the photo (No. 90 in the series) bears the title of "Night View of Saruwaka-machi", and shows a street in Asakusa, formerly Edo's main entertainment district. The shadows projected by the people walking in the street hint at puppets on the stage; the print also exemplifies Hiroshige's subtle use of colour. Hiroshige was a major influence on many European artists of the late 19th century, notably Vincent Van Gogh and the French Impressionists.

Kabuki is a form of dance-drama for which the Asakusa district was renowned; ikebana is the art of flower arranging, while teriyaki is a cooking technique.

Answer: flags

Born in Boston in 1859, Frederick Childe Hassam began painting cityscapes in the 1880s. Following the example of the French Impressionists, he concentrated on scenes from everyday life in his hometown. After a period spent in Paris, he moved to New York with his wife, where he produced a number of street scenes increasingly influenced by Impressionism. By the early 20th century, Hassam had become financially and critically successful. His "Flag Series" was started in 1916, inspired by a parade in favour of US involvement in WWI held in New York's Fifth Avenue. One of the paintings in the series, "The Avenue in the Rain" (1917), Hassam's best-known work, has been part of the permanent art collection of the White House since 1963.

"Rainy Day in Boston" (1885) is one of Hassam's early cityscapes, said to have been considerably influenced by "Paris Street: Rainy Day" by French Pre-Impressionist artist Gustave Caillebotte. Hassam's work - now at the Toledo Museum of Art (Ohio, US) depicts a detail of Boston's South End, a fashionable neighbourhood where the artist lived at the time. Hassam captured the shiny, mirror-like effect of the rain on the street's asphalt paving, using a wide-angle view of the streets that suggests the influence of photography.

Answer: Glasgow

Born in Leeds in 1836, John Atkinson Grimshaw worked mostly in northern England and Scotland, eventually specializing in nighttime scenes, or "moonlights". His keen interest in the realistic depiction of urban landscapes was fuelled by his passion for photography; he is known to have used a camera obscura (as Vermeer did over two centuries earlier) to create an outline for his works by projecting scenes onto the canvas. Though this technique was frowned upon at the time, Grimshaw made up for any shortcomings with his masterful handling of colour, light and shadow. James McNeill Whistler, who worked with him for a time, considered Grimshaw's nocturnes superior to his own.

The painting in the photo, titled "Glasgow, Saturday Night", shows how Grimshaw managed to infuse his depictions of urban landscapes in the industrial Britain of the late Victorian era with a sense of beauty. The yellow light reflected in the rain-slick cobbles of the quay, and the mist softening the contours of the buildings and the masts of the ships create an almost lyrical atmosphere, glossing over the poverty and squalor that were rife in Victorian cities. In the 1880s, Grimshaw produced a number of moonlit views of Glasgow for the city's merchants and industrialists, whose wealth came from the docks depicted in those views. Like most of Grimshaw's work, this painting belongs to a private collection.

Answer: Montmartre

A Danish national by birth, Camille Pissarro was one of the original members of the group of artists who held the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874. His extensive body of work includes quite a few cityscapes - many of them of Paris, where he lived on and off for a good part of his life. The fourteen paintings in the series dedicated to Boulevard Montmartre were executed between February and April 1897, when Pissarro was already suffering from a recurring eye condition that prevented him from working outdoors unless the weather was warm. The artist had taken lodgings at the Grand Hotel de Russie, and from his upper-floor window he was able to get almost a bird's-eye of the boulevard and everything in it. In these paintings, Pissarro captured the changing effects of light and weather in the transition from winter to spring. The neutral palette used in the painting in the photo - titled "Boulevard Montmartre, Morning, Cloudy Weather" (at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia) - changes into brighter colours, dominated by the green of new leaves, in "The Boulevard Montmartre on a Spring Morning", auctioned at Sotheby's in London for £19,682,500.

Despite its name, Boulevard Montmartre is not located on the famed hill of Montmartre, where Pissarro lived for a time, but is one of Paris' four "grands boulevards" that surround the oldest part of the city centre.