Sapiens Verbum — Art History Explained

A sixteen-year-old mistress with a reputation for outsmarting the philosophers at her own dinner table. A small white animal caught mid-turn in her arms, its fur rendered hair by hair. And, four and a half centuries later, a Nazi governor who liked the painting enough to hang it in his own office while he ran occupied Poland from the castle upstairs. Leonardo da Vinci's Lady with an Ermine is barely the size of a serving tray, one of only about seventeen paintings scholars agree he actually finished, and easily the most eventful decade any Renaissance portrait has ever had. Quick facts Artist: Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) Date: c. 1489–1491 Medium: Oil on walnut panel Dimensions: 54.8 × 40.3 cm (21½ × 15⅞ in) Collection: Czartoryski Museum, Kraków Notable fact: Recovered in 1945 from the Bavarian country house of Hans Frank, the Nazi governor of occupied Poland, who had kept it in his Wawel Castle office for most of the war Le...

The Scene Everyone Skips: George Edward Robertson's Lady of Shalott Arrives at Camelot (1900) Picture "The Lady of Shalott" and one image almost certainly comes to mind: a woman alone in a boat, hair loose, candles guttering, drifting down a river toward her death. That is John William Waterhouse's 1888 painting, reproduced on more posters and postcards than perhaps any other single scene from Tennyson. But Tennyson's poem does not end with her drifting alone. It ends with her arrival — already dead — at Camelot, and with the crowd of knights and ladies who come out to see what has washed up at their door, Lancelot among them. Almost nobody paints that part. George Edward Robertson, a Royal Academy regular better known for scenes of Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, did. Quick facts Artist: George Edward Robertson (British, 1864–1920) Date: 1900 Medium: Oil on canvas Dimensions: 137.8 × 194.3 cm (54¼ × 76½ in) Locati...

The Vulture That Wasn't There: Freud's Mistranslated Secret in Leonardo's Virgin and Child with St Anne (c. 1501–1519) In 1910, Sigmund Freud published an essay claiming to have found a hidden vulture folded into the blue drapery of the Virgin's robe in one of Leonardo da Vinci's last paintings — proof, he argued, of a childhood memory the artist had buried and then, without knowing it, painted. The theory would go on to shape a century of psychoanalytic art criticism. There was just one problem: Leonardo never wrote the word "vulture." Freud was working from a German translation that had mistranslated the Italian word Leonardo actually used, and the bird he described was something else entirely. The painting that carried this famous error for over a hundred years is the Louvre's Virgin and Child with St Anne , a work Leonardo kept at his side, unfinished, for nearly two decades — and never delivered to the patron who commissioned it. Quick fact...

Giuseppe Arcimboldo spent three decades painting portraits that fall apart the moment you look closely. A cheek is a peach. An eyebrow is a pea pod. A beard is a tangle of roots and chestnuts. Step back and it's a bishop, an emperor, a season of the year. Step in and it's a very strange still life. His patrons were Holy Roman Emperors, and they didn't just tolerate the joke — they commissioned more of it. Six of his paintings, below, still do exactly what they did in the 1560s: convince you they're one thing, then make you look twice. Quick facts Artist: Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1526–1593) Theme: Human faces built entirely from fruit, vegetables, flowers, fire, and roots Paintings in this guide: Spring , Summer , Fire , Vertumnus (1591), Four Seasons in One Head (c. 1590), Self-Portrait Drawing (c. 1587) Notable fact: He was the official court portraitist to three Holy Roman Emperors in Milan, Vienna, and Prague — the produce was diplomacy, not comedy ...

For most of the twentieth century, this painting fooled everyone twice over. First, experts believed it showed Rembrandt's own brother. Then they believed Rembrandt himself had painted it. Neither claim survived the century intact. Quick facts Artist: Circle of Rembrandt (formerly attributed to Rembrandt van Rijn) Date: c. 1650 Medium: Oil on canvas (67.5 x 50.7 cm) Collection: Gemaldegalerie, Berlin Notable fact: Bought in 1897 as a newly discovered Rembrandt; the attribution was formally withdrawn in 1986 after a multi-year technical investigation Circle of Rembrandt, The Man with the Golden Helmet, c. 1650. Oil on canvas. Gemaldegalerie, Berlin. Public domain. A Face Swallowed by Shadow An old soldier sits half-turned from us, his features almost lost in darkness. What the light picks out instead is the helmet: an extravagant, fantastical thing bristling with earpieces, a feathered plume, and medallions hammered into the gold, each catching a different angle of the same l...

A knight's helmet dangles loose in one hand. His armor presses against a woman's vivid blue dress as they meet -- for the last time, though neither says so -- on a narrow stone stairwell. She holds him with both arms; his sword stays sheathed at his side, and he is already half-turned toward whatever is waiting below. Frederic William Burton's The Meeting on the Turret Stairs (1864) is only a watercolour, barely larger than a cafe tabletop, and yet the National Gallery of Ireland has had to build a queuing system around it. Quick facts Artist: Frederic William Burton (1816-1900) Date: 1864 Medium: Watercolour and gouache on paper, 95.5 x 60.8 cm Collection: National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin Notable fact: Voted Ireland's favourite painting in a 2012 public poll; now shown only two hours a week to protect its pigments from light damage Frederic William Burton, Hellelil and Hildebrand, the Meeting on the Turret Stairs, 1864. Watercolour and gouache on paper. Nationa...

There are no faces to speak of — just a jaw in profile, a cheek pressed shut, a pair of closed eyes. Gustav Klimt buries almost everything else under a wall of gold: hard black-and-white rectangles wrapping him, soft spirals of flowers wrapping her, the two figures fused into a single glowing shape kneeling at the edge of a flower-strewn cliff. Painted in Vienna between 1907 and 1908, Der Kuss (The Kiss) is the image most people picture the instant they hear the word "Klimt" — and more than a century later, historians still can't say for certain who is actually being kissed. Quick facts Artist: Gustav Klimt (1862–1918) Date: 1907–1908 Medium: Oil, gold and silver leaf on canvas, 180 × 180 cm Collection: Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna Notable fact: Bought by the Austrian state before Klimt had even finished painting it Gustav Klimt, The Kiss (Der Kuss), 1907–1908. Oil, gold and silver leaf on canvas. Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna. Public domain....