123 Art and Literature Trivia Questions and Answers
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Easy Art and Literature Trivia Questions
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In the painting American Gothic, what farm implement does the man hold?
a pitchfork
Grant Wood modeled the stern-faced man on his own dentist and the woman on his sister, painting them in front of a real house in Eldon, Iowa whose gothic-style window inspired the title. Art historians often note how the fork's three tines echo the stitching on the man's overalls.
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In The Birth of Venus, what carries Venus to the shore?
a seashell
Painted around 1485, the scene shows Zephyrus, the west wind, blowing Venus toward Paphos on Cyprus while a waiting figure, often identified as Flora, holds out a flowered cloak to cover her. The canvas hangs in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.
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Who wrote the Roman epic poem The Aeneid?
Virgil
The Roman poet Virgil wrote The Aeneid in the 1st century BCE. Its hero Aeneas travels from the ruins of Troy toward the destiny that will lead to Rome's foundations.
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Who wrote Alice's Adventures in Wonderland?
Lewis Carroll
Lewis Carroll was the pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, an Oxford mathematics lecturer who first told the story aloud during an 1862 boat trip to entertain a friend's young daughter, Alice Liddell.
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In Snow White, what food does the queen use to poison the princess?
apple
The queen poisons Snow White with a disguised apple.
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Who wrote the novel Beloved?
Toni Morrison
Toni Morrison published Beloved in 1987. Inspired in part by the story of an enslaved mother, the novel explores memory, trauma, and the afterlife of slavery.
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Who painted The Birth of Venus?
Sandro Botticelli
Sandro Botticelli painted The Birth of Venus in the 1480s. The scene shows Venus arriving on shore after being born from sea foam, drawing on classical mythology.
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What colors appear in the head covering of Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring?
blue and yellow
The girl's head covering combines blue fabric with a yellow-gold band.
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In Charles Perrault's fairy tale, the clever cat asks his penniless master for a sack and one other thing. What is it?
A pair of boots
In Perrault's 1697 tale a miller dies leaving his youngest son nothing but a cat. The cat asks for a sack and a pair of boots, then uses them to catch game for the king, bluff an ogre out of his castle and pass his master off as the Marquis of Carabas.
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Which artist created the Campbell's Soup Cans series?
Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol presented Campbell's Soup Cans as a series in 1962. Repeating a familiar commercial product helped make consumer culture a subject of Pop Art.
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Who wrote The Canterbury Tales?
Geoffrey Chaucer
Geoffrey Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales in Middle English.
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In The Emperor's New Clothes, who first says the emperor has no clothes?
child
A child is the first person to state openly that the emperor is unclothed.
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Who wrote The Color Purple?
Alice Walker
Alice Walker wrote The Color Purple, which won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
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Who wrote Crime and Punishment?
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote Crime and Punishment.
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Where is the original Michelangelo's David housed?
the Accademia Gallery
The original David was moved indoors to Florence's Accademia Gallery in 1873 for protection. Replicas stand in locations including Piazza della Signoria and Piazzale Michelangelo.
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Which Renaissance artist sculpted the statue of David completed in 1504?
Michelangelo
Michelangelo sculpted David from a single block of Carrara marble between 1501 and 1504. The statue depicts the biblical hero before his battle with Goliath.
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Who wrote The Divine Comedy?
Dante Alighieri
Dante Alighieri wrote The Divine Comedy in the early 14th century. The poem takes its narrator through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise and helped establish the Tuscan literary tradition.
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Who wrote Don Quixote?
Miguel de Cervantes
Miguel de Cervantes wrote Don Quixote, whose two parts appeared in 1605 and 1615. Its deluded knight and practical squire are often treated as foundational figures in the modern novel.
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Who wrote the novel Dracula?
Bram Stoker
Irish writer Bram Stoker wrote Dracula.
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In Shakespeare's time, which performers commonly played female roles on the English stage?
Boy apprentices
Women did not perform on the professional English stage in Shakespeare's era. Companies used boy actors, often trained as apprentices, for female characters.
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Who wrote Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus?
Mary Shelley
Mary Shelley published Frankenstein anonymously in 1818. The novel's scientist Victor Frankenstein creates a living being and then confronts the consequences of abandoning it.
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Traditional fresco painting uses what support?
Wet plaster
Traditional fresco painting applies pigments to wet plaster, allowing the colors to bond with the surface as the plaster dries. This technique helps create murals that can remain remarkably durable for centuries.
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Who painted Girl with a Pearl Earring?
Johannes Vermeer
Johannes Vermeer painted Girl with a Pearl Earring around 1665. The work is sometimes called the 'Mona Lisa of the North' because of its enigmatic expression and intimate scale.
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Which literary genre is known for eerie settings, supernatural elements, and psychological terror?
Gothic literature
Gothic literature commonly uses dark settings, the supernatural, suspense, and psychological fear.
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Who wrote Great Expectations?
Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens wrote the novel Great Expectations.
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Who wrote The Great Gatsby?
F. Scott Fitzgerald
F. Scott Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby in 1925. The novel's glittering parties and doomed romance examine wealth, aspiration, and the mythology of the American Dream.
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Who created The Great Wave off Kanagawa?
Katsushika Hokusai
Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai created The Great Wave off Kanagawa.
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Who painted Guernica?
Pablo Picasso
Pablo Picasso painted Guernica in 1937 in response to the bombing of the Basque town during the Spanish Civil War. Its huge monochrome composition became an anti-war symbol.
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How many lines does a traditional haiku have?
Three lines
A traditional Japanese haiku is arranged in three lines.
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What must Rapunzel let down from her tower window?
hair
Rapunzel lowers her long hair from the tower window.
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Who wrote the tragedy Hamlet?
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare wrote Hamlet around the turn of the 17th century. Its Danish prince, ghost story, and questions about action and uncertainty have made it one of the most studied plays in English.
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Who wrote The Handmaid's Tale?
Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood published The Handmaid's Tale in 1985. The dystopian novel is narrated by Offred, a woman forced into reproductive servitude by the regime of Gilead.
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Who wrote the Harry Potter books?
J.K. Rowling
J.K. Rowling wrote the seven main Harry Potter novels.
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Who wrote The Hobbit?
J. R. R. Tolkien
J. R. R. Tolkien published The Hobbit in 1937. Bilbo Baggins leaves his comfortable home and joins a quest to reclaim treasure from the dragon Smaug.
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In Edvard Munch's The Scream, what is the central figure doing?
hands pressed to its head
The figure stands on a bridge above Oslofjord, palms pressed flat against a bald skull as its mouth stretches into a long wordless oval. Munch returned to the image at least four times between 1893 and 1910 in tempera and pastel, and also issued it as a lithograph.
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Which Mark Twain novel follows a boy and a runaway man down the Mississippi?
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Published in 1884, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is narrated by Huck himself in the everyday speech of the Mississippi valley, and the raft journey he shares with the escaped slave Jim carries the whole book.
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Who is traditionally credited with The Iliad?
Homer
No verified details of Homer's life survive, and scholars still debate the Homeric question: whether one poet or a tradition of oral storytellers shaped the epic before it was finally written down, likely around the 8th century BCE.
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What French phrase describes the Impressionist practice of painting outdoors?
en plein air
“En plein air” is French for “in the open air,” describing artists painting outdoors directly from the landscape. Impressionists valued the practice for capturing natural light and changing atmospheric effects.
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Which Renaissance artist painted The Last Supper in a Milan monastery?
Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo painted The Last Supper around 1498 in the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie. The scene captures the disciples' reactions at one dramatic instant after Jesus announces a betrayal.
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In Andersen's tale, what does the little mermaid give the sea witch in exchange for a pair of legs?
Her voice
The sea witch cuts out the little mermaid's tongue as payment for the potion that splits her tail into legs. In Andersen's ending the prince marries someone else, and the mermaid gets back neither her voice nor her old life.
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Who wrote The Little Prince?
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
French writer and aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote The Little Prince.
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Which pair of ancient Greek sculptures are both masterpieces housed at the Louvre?
Venus de Milo and Winged Victory of Samothrace
The Venus de Milo and Winged Victory are both famous Louvre sculptures. They represent different ideals of Greek art: serene beauty in one and dramatic movement in the other.
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In which city is the Louvre Museum located?
Paris
The Louvre is located in Paris beside the Seine. It began as a medieval fortress before becoming a royal palace and then a public museum.
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Which family made Florence a major center of Renaissance artistic patronage?
the Medici family
The Medici used banking wealth and political influence to support artists, architects, and scholars. Their patronage helped make Florence a magnet for Renaissance innovation.
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Who wrote The Metamorphosis?
Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka wrote The Metamorphosis, first published in 1915. Gregor Samsa's unexplained transformation into a gigantic insect becomes a strange study of isolation and family obligation.
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Who wrote Moby-Dick?
Herman Melville
Herman Melville published Moby-Dick in 1851. Ishmael narrates Captain Ahab's obsessive pursuit of the white whale, blending adventure with philosophy and natural history.
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In Moby-Dick, what name does the narrator give himself in the opening line?
Ishmael
The narrator introduces himself as Ishmael, making the famous declaration that begins 'Call me Ishmael.' He serves as both participant and reflective observer of the voyage.
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In which museum is Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa displayed?
The Louvre
The Mona Lisa is displayed in the Louvre in Paris, a former royal palace that became a public museum in 1793. It is one of the museum's best-known works.
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Who painted the Mona Lisa?
Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa in the early 16th century. The portrait is displayed in the Louvre Museum in Paris and is famous for its subtle smile.
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Which literary genre is most closely linked to Aesop?
Fable
Aesop is traditionally associated with fables, brief moral narratives often involving animals.
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Who painted The Night Watch?
Rembrandt
Rembrandt completed The Night Watch in 1642, depicting a civic militia company in dramatic light and shadow. Its official title is The Militia Company of District II under the Command of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq.
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Who painted Nighthawks?
Edward Hopper
Edward Hopper painted Nighthawks, his well-known 1942 scene of people in an urban diner at night.
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Which author wrote the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four?
George Orwell
George Orwell published Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1949. The novel introduced ideas such as Big Brother, Newspeak, and the rewriting of historical records by a totalitarian state.
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Who is traditionally credited with composing the ancient Greek epic The Odyssey?
Homer
The Odyssey is traditionally attributed to Homer, though details about the poet's identity remain uncertain. The epic follows Odysseus's long return journey after the Trojan War.
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Who wrote The Old Man and the Sea?
Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway published The Old Man and the Sea in 1952. The novella follows the Cuban fisherman Santiago in a difficult struggle with a giant marlin.
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Who wrote One Hundred Years of Solitude?
Gabriel García Márquez
Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez published One Hundred Years of Solitude in 1967. The multigenerational story of the Buendía family is a landmark of magical realism.
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What collection includes the stories of Aladdin and Ali Baba?
One Thousand and One Nights
Aladdin and Ali Baba are among the stories associated with One Thousand and One Nights.
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What object reveals the princess's true identity in Andersen's tale?
pea
The princess proves her identity by feeling the object through the stacked mattresses.
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Who painted The Persistence of Memory?
Salvador Dalí
Salvador Dalí painted The Persistence of Memory in 1931. The melting clocks make the painting a classic example of Surrealism's dreamlike imagery.
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Which art movement did Pablo Picasso co-found with Georges Braque?
Cubism
Picasso and Braque developed Cubism in the early 20th century. Cubist artists broke subjects into geometric facets and showed several viewpoints at once.
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Who wrote The Picture of Dorian Gray?
Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde published The Picture of Dorian Gray in 1890 and revised it for book publication in 1891. Dorian's portrait records the corruption that his outward appearance hides.
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Who sculpted the famous Pieta in St Peter's Basilica?
Michelangelo Buonarroti
Michelangelo carved the marble Pieta, showing Mary holding the body of Jesus, when he was only 24. It is the one work he ever signed, cutting his name into the band across Mary's chest after hearing visitors credit it to another sculptor.
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What painting technique builds images from many small dots of color?
Pointillism
Pointillism places separate dots of color so the viewer's eye blends them at a distance. Georges Seurat and Paul Signac were leading practitioners of the technique.
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In Goldilocks and the Three Bears, what food is too hot, too cold, and just right?
porridge
Goldilocks samples the bears' porridge and finds one bowl just right.
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Who wrote Pride and Prejudice?
Jane Austen
Jane Austen published Pride and Prejudice in 1813. The novel follows Elizabeth Bennet as she negotiates family expectations, first impressions, and changing feelings about Mr. Darcy.
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In Beauty and the Beast, what flower does Belle's father pick?
rose
Belle's father picks a rose from the Beast's garden.
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Which author created Sherlock Holmes?
Arthur Conan Doyle
Doyle introduced Holmes and Dr. Watson in the 1887 novel A Study in Scarlet. Holmes's emphasis on observation and deduction helped establish the modern detective story.
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Who painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel?
Michelangelo
Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling between 1508 and 1512. Its central panels depict scenes from Genesis, including The Creation of Adam.
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What does Cinderella leave behind at midnight?
slipper
In Perrault’s Cinderella, she leaves behind a slipper at midnight.
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What object pricks the princess's finger in Sleeping Beauty?
spindle
In the Brothers Grimm telling, the king ordered every spindle in the kingdom burned to stop the prophecy, but on her fifteenth birthday the princess found one anyway, in a locked room atop a tower.
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Who painted The Starry Night?
Vincent van Gogh
Vincent van Gogh painted The Starry Night in 1889 while staying at an asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. Its swirling sky is one of the most recognizable images in Western art.
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In The Three Little Pigs, what does the wolf blow down first?
straw house
The wolf first blows down the house made of straw.
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In Rumpelstiltskin, what material has to be spun into gold?
straw
A miller boasts to the king that his daughter can spin straw into gold. The king locks her in a room piled with it, and the little man who appears and does the spinning for her takes her necklace, then her ring, and finally a promise of her firstborn child.
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What bird does the rejected hatchling become in Andersen's tale?
swan
The rejected hatchling grows into a beautiful swan.
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Who wrote A Tale of Two Cities?
Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens wrote A Tale of Two Cities, a novel set in London and Paris during the French Revolution.
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Which artist created The Scream?
Edvard Munch
Norwegian artist Edvard Munch created The Scream, a work that exists in several versions. The distorted figure and blood-red sky are associated with anxiety and existential dread.
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What is unusual about the clocks in Salvador Dalí's The Persistence of Memory?
They are melting
The painting shows several clocks drooping as if they were soft.
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Who wrote Things Fall Apart?
Chinua Achebe
Nigerian author Chinua Achebe published Things Fall Apart in 1958. The novel portrays Igbo society and the disruption caused by British colonial rule through the life of Okonkwo.
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Which sculptor created The Thinker?
Auguste Rodin
Auguste Rodin created The Thinker as part of his larger project The Gates of Hell. The seated figure was originally conceived as a representation of the poet Dante.
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In traditional painting, which three colours are treated as the primaries?
Red, yellow, and blue
Traditional painting instruction treats red, yellow, and blue as primary colors from which other hues can be mixed. This RYB model differs from the cyan-magenta-yellow model used in printing.
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Who wrote the novel The Trial?
Franz Kafka
The Trial is Franz Kafka's unfinished novel about Josef K., who is arrested and prosecuted without being told his crime.
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How many panels does a traditional triptych have?
Three panels
A triptych is an artwork made of three connected panels, often with hinged outer wings. The format was especially common in European religious art.
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Who wrote the novel Ulysses?
James Joyce
Irish author James Joyce wrote Ulysses.
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The Venus de Milo depicts the goddess without which body parts?
arms
The sculpture's arms were lost before or during its rediscovery, and their original pose remains unknown. The missing limbs have become part of the statue's enduring mystery.
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Which sculpture depicts Aphrodite and is displayed at the Louvre?
Venus de Milo
The Venus de Milo is an ancient Greek statue identified with Aphrodite and displayed at the Louvre.
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Who wrote the novel War and Peace?
Leo Tolstoy
Tolstoy's epic novel follows several Russian families during the Napoleonic Wars. It combines intimate character studies with broad reflections on history, society, and personal choice.
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Which artist created the Water Lilies series?
Claude Monet
Claude Monet painted his Water Lilies series from observations of the pond at his home in Giverny. The repeated subject let him explore changing light, color, and reflection.
Medium Art and Literature Trivia Questions
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What dark plant rises in the foreground of Van Gogh's The Starry Night?
a cypress
A tall, dark cypress rises along the left side of the composition.
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Who painted American Gothic?
Grant Wood
Grant Wood painted American Gothic in 1930, posing his own dentist and his sister as the models. The pitchfork-holding farmer and the woman beside him became an enduring image of rural American life.
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Who painted the Arnolfini Portrait?
Jan van Eyck
Jan van Eyck painted the Arnolfini Portrait in 1434, renowned for its meticulous detail and symbolism.
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Which Jane Austen novel was published first?
Sense and Sensibility
Sense and Sensibility was Austen's first published novel, appearing in 1811.
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What is the German term for a novel following a young protagonist's moral and psychological growth?
Bildungsroman
Bildungsroman means novel of formation. It follows one character from an unformed youth through mistakes and setbacks into maturity, a pattern set by Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship and followed by Jane Eyre and Great Expectations.
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Which literary form tells its story through letters written by the characters?
Epistolary novel
An epistolary novel is built from documents the characters themselves write, usually letters - Samuel Richardson's Pamela and Bram Stoker's Dracula are examples. A picaresque novel follows a roguish hero through episodic adventures, while historical and pastoral novels are defined by their setting rather than by their form.
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In which novel does J. D. Salinger's Holden Caulfield appear?
The Catcher in the Rye
Salinger's 1951 novel follows Holden over several days after he leaves his preparatory school. Its first-person voice explores alienation, grief, and the uneasy transition to adulthood.
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Which poetic metre runs five feet to the line, each foot an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one?
Iambic pentameter
An iamb is an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one, and pentameter means five feet per line - the metre of Shakespeare's plays and sonnets. A trochee reverses that stress pattern, a dactyl is one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed, and an anapest is two unstressed followed by one stressed.
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Which artist painted Impression, Sunrise?
Claude Monet
Claude Monet painted Impression, Sunrise in 1872. A critic's use of the painting's title helped give the Impressionist movement its name.
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Where did the name Impressionism come from?
A hostile newspaper review
The critic Louis Leroy seized on the title of Monet's Impression, Sunrise to mock the group's 1874 show, labelling the painters Impressionists as an insult. They took the name for themselves and it stuck.
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Who painted the gold-leaf painting The Kiss, completed in 1908?
Gustav Klimt
Gustav Klimt painted The Kiss during his golden phase, laying gold leaf over the canvas. It hangs in the Belvedere in Vienna and is the best known work of the Vienna Secession.
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Who painted Las Meninas?
Diego Velázquez
Velázquez made the viewer part of Las Meninas's complicated arrangement of figures and reflections. The painting is displayed in Madrid's Prado Museum.
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In traditional stained-glass windows, what metal holds the pieces of glass together?
Lead
The grooved strips that grip each piece of glass, called cames, are lead - soft enough to bend around any shape and then soldered at the joints. Copper entered the craft only much later, as the thin foil used in Tiffany-style work.
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Who painted Liberty Leading the People?
Eugène Delacroix
The painting commemorates the July Revolution of 1830, when Parisians overthrew King Charles X, and its central figure of Liberty is often linked to France's national personification, Marianne. The boy brandishing pistols beside her is thought to have inspired Victor Hugo's street urchin Gavroche in Les Miserables.
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About how tall is Michelangelo's David?
about 17 feet (5.2 metres)
Michelangelo's marble David stands about 17 feet (5.2 metres) tall, excluding its base.
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Northanger Abbey is partly a satire of which literary genre?
Gothic novels
Its heroine, Catherine Morland, has an imagination shaped by sensational Gothic fiction. Austen uses her fantasies to poke fun at the genre's melodramatic conventions.
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What is the term for a work that deliberately imitates another work or style for comic effect?
Parody
A parody takes a recognisable work or style and exaggerates its features for comic effect. An elegy is a poem of mourning, an allegory tells one story so that it stands for another, and a pastoral idealises country life.
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Founded in London in 1848, a brotherhood of English painters took its name from its wish to work like the Italian artists who came before which painter?
Raphael
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, started by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt, admired the bright colour and minute detail of Italian painting made before Raphael. What it opposed was the polished academic manner taught in its own day, which had been built on Raphael's successors.
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In poetry, what is a line or group of lines repeated at intervals called?
Refrain
A refrain is a line or group of lines repeated through a poem, most often at the end of each stanza. A couplet is two consecutive rhyming lines, a caesura is a pause inside a line, and enjambment is a sentence running on past the line break.
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Which pope commissioned Michelangelo to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling?
Pope Julius II
Julius II commissioned the ceiling early in the 16th century. Michelangelo's fresco cycle includes the Creation of Adam and scenes from Genesis.
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Which narrative technique presents the unbroken flow of a character's thoughts as they occur?
Stream of consciousness
Stream of consciousness renders thought as a continuous, unedited flow, as in Joyce's Ulysses and Woolf's Mrs Dalloway. Free indirect speech blends a character's voice into third-person narration, a frame narrative is a story told inside another story, and unreliable narration is a narrator the reader cannot take at their word.
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What bird carries Thumbelina to a warmer land?
swallow
A swallow carries Thumbelina to a warm southern land.
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Who painted The Third of May 1808?
Francisco Goya
Francisco de Goya painted The Third of May 1808, a major Spanish painting depicting executions after the uprising in Madrid.
Hard Art and Literature Trivia Questions
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Which rhetorical device sets two sharply opposed ideas against each other in parallel phrasing?
Antithesis
Antithesis balances opposed ideas in matched phrasing, as in the famous opening sentence of Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities. Anaphora repeats the same words at the start of successive clauses, metonymy names a thing by something closely associated with it, and synecdoche names a whole by one of its parts.
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What is the term for a three-dimensional artwork built from found objects?
Assemblage
Assemblage is three-dimensional art put together from found or scavenged material; the term was popularised by Jean Dubuffet in the 1950s. Collage is its flat, glued-paper equivalent, a mosaic is built from cut tesserae, and a readymade is a single manufactured object presented unaltered as art.
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Which term describes the strong contrast of light and dark used to model form in a painting?
Chiaroscuro
Chiaroscuro, Italian for light-dark, models form through strong contrasts of illumination and shadow, pushed to its extreme by Caravaggio. Sfumato is Leonardo's smoky, edgeless blending, foreshortening is the compression of a form projecting towards the viewer, and trompe-l'oeil is illusionism that makes a painted object look real.
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Which term describes a standing figure whose weight rests on one leg, tilting the hips and shoulders in opposite directions?
Contrapposto
Contrapposto, meaning counterpoise, is the relaxed weight-shifted stance Greek sculptors worked out in the early fifth century BC and Renaissance sculptors revived - Michelangelo's David is the textbook example. Foreshortening is an effect of perspective, sfumato is soft blended edging in paint, and grisaille is painting entirely in shades of grey.
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Which ancient Greek architectural order has capitals carved with acanthus leaves?
Corinthian
The Corinthian capital is a basket of acanthus leaves, the most ornate of the Greek orders and the last of the three to appear. Doric capitals are plain cushions, Ionic capitals carry paired scrolls called volutes, and the Tuscan order is a later Roman simplification rather than a Greek order at all.
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Which painting technique mixes pigment into hot wax and fuses it to the surface with heat?
Encaustic
Encaustic mixes pigment into heated beeswax, applies it molten and then fuses it to the panel with a heat source; Roman-era mummy portraits from Egypt and Jasper Johns's flag paintings both use it. Tempera is bound in egg, gouache in gum arabic, and fresco is pigment in water painted into wet lime plaster.
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In which printmaking technique is the design bitten into a metal plate with acid?
Etching
In etching the plate is coated with an acid-resistant ground, the design is drawn through it with a needle, and acid bites the exposed lines. Engraving cuts the plate directly with a burin and uses no acid, lithography works chemically on a flat stone, and a woodcut prints from the raised surface left on a block.
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Which Shakespeare play was being performed when the Globe Theatre caught fire in 1613?
Henry VIII
A cannon fired during a performance of Henry VIII set the Globe Theatre ablaze on 29 June 1613.
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What event does the painting Liberty Leading the People commemorate?
The July Revolution of 1830
The painting marks the three days of July 1830 that toppled King Charles X and put Louis-Philippe on the throne. Eugene Delacroix finished it within months, and his figure of Liberty carrying the tricolour became the standard image of French popular revolt.
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In which form of classical Japanese theatre does the lead actor traditionally wear a carved wooden mask?
Noh
Noh's lead actor, the shite, performs in a carved wooden mask whose expression appears to change with the angle of the head. Kabuki actors use painted kumadori make-up instead of masks, bunraku is puppet theatre, and rakugo is a solo seated storytelling art.
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Who wrote the first Surrealist Manifesto, published in 1924?
André Breton
French writer André Breton published the first Surrealist Manifesto in 1924. He described Surrealism as a way to explore thought beyond ordinary logic and conscious control.
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Which painting medium binds its pigment in egg yolk?
Tempera
Egg tempera mixes pigment with egg yolk and water, and dominated European panel painting until oil displaced it in the fifteenth century. Gouache is bound in gum arabic, casein in a milk protein, and acrylic in a synthetic polymer emulsion.
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What was the Uffizi originally built as in Renaissance Florence?
an office block for the Medici government
Cosimo I de' Medici commissioned Giorgio Vasari in 1560 to house Florence's judiciary and administrative offices under one roof. The Medici later filled its top floor with art, and it opened to the public in 1769 as one of the world's first public museums.
Related lists
Questions from this category also appear gathered together here.
Answered in full
These come up often enough that each one has its own page.
- Who wrote Alice's Adventures in Wonderland?
- Who wrote the novel Beloved?
- Who wrote the tragedy Hamlet?
- Which artist painted Impression, Sunrise?
- In which city is Louvre Museum located?
- Who wrote The Old Man and the Sea?
- Who wrote portrait of Dorian Gray?
- Which artist created The Scream?
- Which sculptor created The Thinker?
- Who wrote the novel War and Peace?
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