Art Facts
Art Facts

22 Weird, Wild, and Fun Art Facts

Karin Lehnardt
By Karin Lehnardt, Senior Writer
Published October 11, 2025
  • The Mona Lisa has its own mailbox in Louvre because so many fans write her love letters.[1]
  • Vincent van Gogh reportedly only sold one painting during his lifetime: "The Red Vineyard." He died in 1890, in what is widely believed to be a suicide.[1]
  • The first artists in history used red clay, natural pigments from plants, and ashes for paint.[1]
  • The models in Grant Wood's American Gothic are his sister (who is wearing their mother's apron) and Wood's 62-year-old dentist.[1]
  • Leonardo Da Vinci's The Last Supper originally included Jesus' feet; however, in 1652, builders cut into the bottom center of the mural while they were installing a doorway and removed the feet.[1]
  • Color wheel Fact
    Newton's rainbow
  • Sir Isaac Newton popularized the color wheel in 1706 when he demonstrated refracted white sunlight into its six colors.[1]
  • Hitler was an aspiring but failed artist. His artwork was sold in a Vienna store before WW II and were bought primarily by Jews.[1]
  • Tree shaping is a form of art. Artists shape trees into structures such as benches, bridges, fences, tunnels, and more.[1]
  • The U.S. Supreme Court officially recognized video games as art in 2012.[1]
  • In 1961, Italian artist Piero Manzoni created a piece called "Artist's Shit." It consisted of 90 cans, each containing 30 grams of Manzoni's feces.[1]
  • The Olympic games previously included gold medals in architecture, painting, sculpturing, and literature. Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of modern Olympics, won a gold medal in literature in the 1912 summer Olympics.[1]
  • An English artist, Andy Brown, stitched together 1,000 used tea bags to create a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II.[1]
  • The town in Vincent van Gogh's The Starry Night is Saint-Remy-de Provence in the south of France. Van Gogh painted it while he was in a psychiatric hospital there. The hospital now has a wing named after Van Gogh.[3]
  • Starry Night Fact
    Van Gogh thought Starry Night was failure

  • There is a Museum of Bad Art (MOBA) which was created in 1994.[1]
  • The worldwide presence of new isotopes from atmospheric atomic testing in the 1950s led to a reliable way to detect art forgeries. Traces of caesium-137 and strontium-90 did not exist in nature before 1945.[1]
  • Art Education Facts
    Art improves brain function and well-being
  • Learning and practicing art can lead to higher achievement in reading and math.[1]
  • John Hurwitz created the world's smallest work of art. The only way to see his sculpture, which is in the eye of a needle, is on the screen of a scanning electron microscope.[1]
  • The world's largest painting is "the Journey of Humanity." At 17,000 square feet, Sacha Jafri's work is an abstraction that features drips, whorls, and splatters of different colors.[1]
  • The world's most expensive piece of art is Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa. While priceless, it has the highest known insurance value at $870 million. The most expensive piece of art ever sold was da Vinci's Salvator Mundi at over $450.3 million at Christie's auction in 2013.[1]
  • Pieta Facts
    Michelangelo carved the Pieta when he was just 24 years old
  • The only work Michelangelo ever signed was "The Pieta." He later considered his signature an outburst of pride and vowed to never sign another work again.[4]
  • Leonardo Da Vinci was a procrastinator and often regretted not finishing his works. He allegedly took 10 years just to finish Mona Lisa's lips.[2]
  • The most stolen piece of artwork of all time is "The Ghent Altarpiece: Adoration of the Mystic Lamb" by Jan Van Eyck.[1]
References

Suggested for you

Prev
Next

Trending Now

Load More
>