Since Vasari published his Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects in 1550, those in the art historical field have been rediscovering and dispersing facts and propositions about artists and artworks. Biographical gossip and process-oriented information often don't increase one's phenomenological understanding of art, but they do satiate the curiosity of an art enthusiast. Last night, Francis Bacon's Three Studies of Lucian Freud became the most expensive piece of art ever sold at $142,405,000 at Christie's Post-War & Contemporary Art Evening. As prices for art continue to rise, expensive works gain an almost mythic reputation, increasing curiosity about the true history behind famous pieces. The following 25 tidbits include facts about how artworks like Anish Kapoor's Cloud Gate are kept clean, how artworks are made—like Géricault's research with cadavers, and how artworks like Rembrandt van Rijn's dimming Night Watch have changed since their inception. Go beyond the surface of your favorite pieces with 25 Things You Didn't Know About Famous Works of Art.
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Paul Cézanne was eight miles from Montagne Sainte-Victoire's peak when painting his Mont Sainte-Victoire series.
James Whistler did not consider Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1 a portrait though the painting is popularly known as Whistler's Mother.
Georges Seurat used zinc yellow, a new pigment at the time, to make the yellow highlights on the lawn in A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte which has since darkened to brown.
There are 21 philosophers represented in Raphael's The School of Athens, but many have not been identified.
Edgar Degas originally planned to sell A Cotton Office in New Orleans to a British textile manufacturer.
Caspar David Friedrich's Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog is filled with recognizable mountains from the Elbe Sandstone Mountains.
Rembrandt's The Night Watch, often mistaken for a nocturnal scene, is a depiction of the company in daylight.
Hokusai's The Great Wave off Kanagawa inspired Debussy's La Mer.
The Christian knight in Albrecht Durer's Knight, Death, and the Devil may have been based on Erasmus' 1504 book Instructions for the Christian Soldier.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder's The Hunters in the Snow was painted after an unusually harsh winter at the onset of the Little Ice Age.
Emanuel Leutze's original Washington Crossing the Delaware was damaged in a studio fire in 1850, restored and acquired by the Kunsthalle collection in Bremen, and then destroyed in a 1942 British air raid.
There are four versions of Edvard Munch's The Scream in different mediums.
Renoir used a number of professional models and also his friends while composing Bal du moulin de la Galette.
Roy Lichtenstein's Woman with Flowered Hat was based on a 1939-1940 Picasso portrait of Dora Maar.
Though Dalí often called his paintings "hand painted dream photographs," The Persistence of Memory nods at the real in the recognizable depiction of cliffs of Catalonia, Dalí's home.
To keep Anish Kapoor's Cloud Gate clean, the sculpture is wiped down with a microfiber cloth twice a day with a solution of water and liquid tide.
Vincent van Gogh painted The Starry Night while in an asylum at Saint-Rémy.
Monet dug a trench and engineered a pulley system to lower and raise the 2.5 meter tall Women in the Garden as he worked on it.
Titian's Venus of Urbino was meant to serve as a "teaching" model for Giulia Varano, the wife of the work's patron, Duke of Urbino Guidobaldo II Della Rovere.
Michelangelo's David is made of a mediocre grade of marble.
Thousands of people, including Franz Kafka, lined up at the Louvre to see the empty spot where the Mona Lisa once hung when the painting was stolen in 1911.
The sheet music in the three versions of Caravaggio's The Lute Player are readable, identifiable pieces of music.
There are 17 known versions of Marcel Duchamp's Fountain.
