Art & Painting Quiz

True

Museum handyman Vincenzo Peruggia walked out with the panel under his coat; it resurfaced in Florence in 1913, and the two-year manhunt is what made the painting globally famous.

True

Pollock favoured commercial alkyd enamels such as Duco because they poured in a continuous stream, something stiff artist's oils could not do — and their instability is now a conservation headache.

Rembrandt van Rijn

Rembrandt earned his living from commissioned portraits, and the 1642 militia group portrait is unusual precisely because he staged it as a scene in motion.

True

A darkened box or room with a small aperture projects an inverted image of the scene outside, which an artist can trace; David Hockney has argued several Old Masters relied on it.

Ultramarine

Lapis came from a single mining region in Afghanistan, so ultramarine was costed separately in contracts and typically reserved for the Virgin's robe.

Encaustic

In encaustic the pigment is bound in heated beeswax and fused to the support; the Fayum mummy portraits painted this way have kept their colour for nearly two thousand years.

True

From the Italian for light-dark, it models volume by tonal contrast rather than outline; Caravaggio pushed it to its extreme in the variant known as tenebrism.

True

The ratio of roughly 1:1.618 was set out in Luca Pacioli's De divina proportione of 1509, illustrated by Leonardo, and shaped how Renaissance painters divided a picture plane.

Pointillism

Seurat and Signac placed unmixed dots side by side so the eye would blend them at a distance, producing a luminosity that mixing on the palette dulls.

Complementary colors

Complementary pairs sit at opposite points of the wheel; mixed together they neutralise towards grey, but placed adjacent they produce the strongest possible contrast.

True

As upper paint layers grow more transparent with age, abandoned first thoughts resurface — literally a repentance, and evidence of how a composition evolved.

True

Colourmen really did grind embalmed remains with myrrh into a transparent brown glaze; supplies dried up in the twentieth century once painters grasped what they were using.

Sinopia

The sinopia was sketched on the rough underlayer in red earth pigment from Sinope, then covered by the final plaster the painter had to finish while it was still wet.

Filippo Brunelleschi

Brunelleschi demonstrated single-point perspective around 1415 with a painted panel and a mirror; Alberti set out the method in writing soon afterwards.

Expressionism

Expressionism subordinated accurate appearance to inner feeling, distorting shape and colour deliberately; Munch's The Scream is its best-known forerunner.

Cubism

Cubism, developed by Picasso and Braque from about 1907, broke objects into facets and showed several viewpoints at once, abandoning the single fixed eye of perspective.

Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo built up many near-transparent glazes so that tones pass into one another without a line — smoke-like, which is what sfumato means.

Blue

Orange sits directly opposite blue on the traditional colour wheel, so the pair intensifies each other when placed side by side — the reason so many film posters lean on orange-and-teal.