1. Vincent van Gogh’s Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear depicts the artist with an injured right ear. In reality, he cut off his left ear. The discrepancy is explained by the fact that Van Gogh used a mirror to create the picture of himself.
2. If you look closely at The Old Guitarist by Pablo Picasso, you can see a dim female silhouette behind the man’s head. After taking infrared and X-ray images of the painting, researchers from the Art Institute of Chicago discovered a few other shapes hidden underneath. Most likely, the artist didn’t have enough money to buy new canvases and had to paint over old ones.
3. During the restoration of Rembrandt’s The Shooting Company of Frans Banning Coco and Willem van Ruytenburch (better known as The Night Watch) in 1947, it was cleaned of a thick layer of soot. After that, it became evident that the scene portrayed in the painting takes place not at night but in daylight.
4. An image of the human brain is discernible not only in The Creation of Adam by Michelangelo but also in another fresco of the Sistine Chapel: The Separation of Light and Darkness. Look at God’s neck: if you superimpose it onto a photo of the human brain as seen from below, you’ll get a perfect overlap of the lines.
5. The figures of David and Goliath in another fresco of the Sistine Chapel created by Michelangelo form the Hebrew letter gimel, which symbolizes strength in the mystical Kabbalah tradition.
6. Margaret Livingstone and Bevil Conway studied Rembrandt’s self-portraits and proved that the painter suffered from stereo blindness. This peculiarity made the painter perceive the world a little differently: he saw reality in 2D instead of 3D. However, it is possible that stereo blindness helped Rembrandt create his immortal masterpieces.
7. One of the most famous paintings by Gustav Klimt portrays Adele Bloch-Bauer. It was commissioned by her husband, the sugar baron Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer. He found out that Adele and Klimt had an affair and believed that after hundreds of sketches the painter would come to hate his mistress. Routine work really made the feelings between the sitter and the artist cool down.
8. That is not the only mystery of Last Supper. The hands of Christ and the apostles, along with the loaves of bread on the table, form something that could be read as a musical notation. Upon testing, it does sound like a short tune.
9. Almost all the paintings of Vincent van Gogh feature a dominant yellow. Professor Paul Wolf explains that as a side effect of an epilepsy remedy that changes color perception. The artist’s world could really look the way we see it in his canvases.
10. There is a solid evidence that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a Mason. Even in his child portrait by Pietro Antonio Lorenzoni, we can see a Masonic symbol: a hidden hand that indicates a hierarchical rank in the secret society.
The links for the same are given below :
1. Vincent Van Gogh’s self portrait
4. The separation of light and darkness
6. David And Goliath in Sistine Chapel
10. Childhood portrait of Mozart
Thank you for Reading ! 🙂
The Artidote 