Art History Behind the Scenes II Quiz

Answer: He ran off with a nun

Here's a favorite tale that hasn't been fully verified. Orphaned as a toddler, the Florentine Lippi became a child novice at the Carmine monastery. However, he proved unsuited to religious life, not least because he liked girls -- a lot. Allowed to train as an artist, he eventually fell in love with a beauteous novice nun named Lucrezia Buti and eloped with her. (If, as some people think, she was the model for the "Madonna and Child with Angels" in the Uffizi, then Lippi can hardly be blamed!) The couple produced two children, including the painter Filippino, and Lippi became the teacher of Sandro Botticelli. One story has it that he refused a chance to be laicized, so he could marry Lucrezia, since he felt marriage might interfere with his ongoing pursuit of whatever pretty women happened to catch his eye.

By the way, Lippi claimed to have been kidnapped by pirates at one point and to have spent months as a slave to a Moorish prince. Well, maybe.

Answer: Hardboiled eggs

According to biographer Giorgio Vasari, whose pronouncements must always be taken with a pound of salt, Piero liked to boil up his eggs in batches of 50, while also cooking the glue-sizing for his paintings. Dietary deficiencies aside, Piero was definitely one of Art History's originals. Working in a satirical and eccentric style, he produced a series of paintings depicting "prehistoric" life (based on Roman author Lucretius) that are comedic, fantastic, and unfailingly inventive.

A good example is "The Discovery of Honey" in the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts. (Additional culinary note: Piero could never have fried potatoes. Native to the New World, they were not introduced to Europe until the late 16th century.)

Answer: He lived in a house with no staircase

The reclusive Pontormo (real name: Jacopo Carrucci) built himself a home but was dilatory about completing the interior. The result was that he had to climb to his studio and bedroom by rope ladder, which he usually kept rolled up, so that no one could just drop in. Severely neurotic, slightly agoraphobic, and a hypochondriac to boot, Pontormo hated crowds and parties.

In the last two years of his life, he kept a diary, now in the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, in which he detailed his anxieties. On the other hand, he will forever be admired as the painter of the spectacular Capponi Chapel in Florence's Santa Felicità (1528) and as the devoted foster-father and teacher of that suave party-animal, Agnolo Bronzino.

Answer: He was a gambler

Devoutly religious and sexually abstemious (or so we think), Guido was known for an elegant style that stressed purity of line and sincere piety of content. Even so, he couldn't refrain from blowing all his money at the gambling table. When he first arrived in Rome, his roommate complained about his all-night card games. Later, according to his otherwise admiring biographer, he gambled away advances on commissions, had to borrow money to settle his debts, and arranged to produce large numbers of hack paintings to recoup his fortunes. Finally, after managing to refrain from betting for two years, he went on a three-day binge and lost thousands of scudi. (That's hard to translate into modern currency, but a family of 5 in 17th-century Rome could manage on 90 scudi a year!) After Guido's death, his cousin and executor settled with at least one creditor by handing over valuable drawings.

Answer: Agostino Tassi

The thoroughly-vilified Tassi (1578-1644) wasn't at all a bad painter. An upwardly-mobile Perugian, who falsely claimed to be the adopted son of an aristocrat (his real father was a furrier), Tassi established a fine reputation as a landscapist, especially in fresco decoration.

He was also a whiz at devising illusionistic architectural settings for other artists' work, the best-known example being Guercino's "Aurora" in the Casino Ludovisi in Rome. After being accused of raping Artemisia, whom he had been hired to teach by her father, artist Orazio Gentileschi, Tassi lied his way through the trial so baldly that the judge reprimanded him.

He also brought in false witnesses. The outcome of the trial is uncertain, owing to missing documents, but Tassi did spend some time in jail -- which didn't hurt his career any.

The full story of the events surrounding the rape is told in Mary Garrard's terrific monograph, "Artemisia Gentileschi: The Image of the Female Hero in Italian Baroque Art" (Princeton, 1989).

Answer: As a cook

Known to Art History as poetic landscapist Claude Lorrain (ca. 1600-82), Gellée worked for Agostino Tassi as a pastry chef! He may have had some early art training, since Tassi was soon using him as an assistant. Pastoral landscape paintings were extremely popular in Rome, and the experienced Tassi could introduce Claude to potential patrons. Though quiet, reserved, and utterly non-intellectual, as compared with his friend and compatriot Nicholas Poussin, Claude worked for many of Rome's most prominent collectors and produced paintings and drawings that, today, are among the treasured possessions of museums.

While not exactly redeeming himself for his assault on Artemisia Gentileschi, Tassi does deserve credit for recognizing that the guy who made his croissants had serious artistic talent.

In fact, for centuries, Tassi was better known as Claude's teacher than for any accomplishments of his own.

Answer: He joined a band of robbers

Supposedly. One of Art History's bad boys, Rosa is said to have abandoned his studies in architecture when he joined a group of "banditti," the many robbers who plagued an economically-stressed Italy during the 17th century. He apparently made sketches while on this adventure and later used them for his dramatic (and very popular) landscape paintings, which often feature banditti. Eventually, he went to Rome, where he tried to establish himself as a serious history painter, while also founding an acting troupe and writing poems, satires, and lampoons (including one of Gian Lorenzo Bernini that was not appreciated by its subject).

Despite his efforts, Rosa's reputation today still rests on those wild landscapes, considered to be "sublime" by 19th-century romantics.

In this vein, Rosa was the subject of a famous, but somewhat overwrought, biography, published in 1824 by Lady Sidney Morgan.

Answer: An explosion in Delft

On October 12, 1654, gunpowder stored in a makeshift arsenal in the basement of a Delft convent exploded, destroying fully one-quarter of the city. (A painting in London by Egbert van der Poel depicts this event's aftermath.) Among the many victims was Carel Fabritius, who had moved to Delft four years earlier. Only 15 paintings by Fabritius are known, but they leave no doubt that he would have become a major master. Fabritius studied with Rembrandt in the 1640's, but by the 50's, his style had departed from his teacher's and moved towards an innovative exploration of space and luminous, silvery, atmospheric effects.

It appears to have been an important influence on the Delft school and has clear affinities with Vermeer's. Fabritius' works include a striking self-portrait in Rotterdam and a beautiful painting of a goldfinch in The Hague.

Incidentally, the Dutch surrender at Breda (to the Spanish) actually took place in 1625 and was commemorated ten years later in a famous painting by Diego Velasquez.

Answer: A nobleman

Somewhat vain and naive at the age of 26, Kauffmann was flattered when a gentleman calling himself "Count Frederick van Horn" paid court to her. After their marriage, he was revealed as a nobody, and a separation took place. Unfortunately, Kauffmann had to wait 14 years before the fake count's death freed her to marry Venetian artist Antonio Zucchi in 1781. Kauffmann, by the way, was typical of successful women artists prior to the 19th century in that she was the daughter of a painter. Until art academies offering day classes became available, standard training procedures -- years' long, live-in apprenticeships in the studios of male artists -- militated against the education of even talented women, unless they had artist-relatives who could train them at home. Kauffmann was very successful, indeed. Skilled as a portraitist and decorative artist (her more ambitious works are so-so), she was friendly with Sir Joshua Reynolds and became a charter member of the Royal Academy in Britain.

Answer: The belly of a mastodon

Maryland native Peale was once described as a "provincial Leonardo," owing to the breadth of his interests. Founder of America's first museum, in what is now Independence Hall in Philadelphia, Peale was an amateur naturalist, who collected curious objects. Among these was the skeleton of a mastodon, which Peale himself excavated in the early 19th century.

After exuberantly carting the bones back to his museum, he invited guests to dine beneath the rib cage. Largely self-taught as an artist, Peale was influenced by John Singleton Copley and briefly studied with Benjamin West.

His portraits are conventional, but other works, such as a painting of the mastodon excavation, are whimsical and creative. A onetime Revolutionary soldier, member of the Pennsylvania Assembly, and an inventor, Peale fathered 17 children, four of whom -- Raphaelle, Rubens, Rembrandt, and Titian -- also became artists.

A self-portrait of 1822 in the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts pictures Peale in his museum with the mastodon jaw in the foreground.

Answer: He buried his poems with her

And dug them up seven years later. The attractive, titian-haired Lizzie Siddal was working as a milliner's assistant when she was noticed by Walter Deverell, a member with Rossetti of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Deverell swiftly introduced her to his colleagues, who began using her as a model. Famously, she posed for John Everett Millais's "Ophelia," for which she had to spend hours floating supine in a bathtub.

After becoming romantically involved with Rossetti, Lizzie began painting herself, but her health was poor, and she overdosed on laudanum in 1862, not long after giving birth to a stillborn child. Rossetti placed the manuscript of his poems in her coffin, but in 1869, friends convinced him that he should get those verses into print; and so poor Lizzie was exhumed.

A better poet than he was a painter, Rossetti nevertheless produced some fine works that reflected his admiration for medieval and Renaissance craftsmanship. Among them is the "Beata Beatrix" of 1864, for which he painted Lizzie from memory.

Answer: Francis Davis Millet

The dashing Frank Millet (1846-1912) may not be well known today, but he was the quintessential Renaissance man. A onetime drummer boy and medic in the Civil War, he performed with distinction at Harvard, where he earned a degree in Literature, and worked as a journalist in Boston. Later, he studied painting at Antwerp's Royal Academy and won unprecedented honors. Back in Boston in the 1870's, he painted murals in H.H. Richardson's Trinity Church and a fine portrait of Mark Twain, among other works, and in 1877, he headed off to cover the Russo-Turkish War under fire. (Russia decorated him for bravery.) As if all that were not enough, he also wrote fiction and translated Tolstoy. Alas, in the spring of 1912, after a year as Director of The American Academy in Rome, he booked passage home on the Titanic.

There is a monument to Millet and to Major Archibald Butt, another Titanic victim, in Washington D.C.

Answer: He was a stockbroker

The half-Peruvian Gauguin had established a successful career as a member of the Paris Stock Exchange when he was encouraged by Camille Pissarro to take up painting himself. The next thing his Danish wife and five kids knew, Gauguin had thrown over stockbroking for the bohemian life of an artist. Frustrated by Impressionism, which he felt did not delve beyond the visual, Gauguin sought an expressionistic approach to interior human life via a blending of early Renaissance values with bold form and color (partly influenced by South American and other "primitive" art) that entered the realm of Symbolism.

He lived briefly with Vincent van Gogh (an argument between the two precipitated the famous ear amputation), but his search for new sensations took him to Tahiti and the Marquesas, where he lived in poverty but remained artistically productive. Somerset Maugham's 1919 novel "The Moon and Sixpence" was inspired by the life of Gauguin.

Answer: Verdun

On patrol at Verdun on March 4, 1916, Marc was hit by shrapnel from an exploding grenade. A founder of the Blaue Reiter group and an associate of Wassily Kandinsky, Marc became an important representative of German Expressionism during his short career and was significantly influenced by both Cubism and Futurism.

In his pursuit of the mystical and the spiritual in art, he became particularly interested in color symbolism and in the emotionally-expressive energies of animal forms, as represented in the painting "Blue Horses" in Minneapolis. By 1916, Marc's reputation was well advanced, and he was placed on a list of German artists serving in the military who were supposed to be reassigned to non-combat duties.

The order came too late to save his life.

Another art-world war casualty was promising French impressionist Frédéric Bazille (1841-1870), who was killed in action in the Franco-Prussian War.

Answer: A fall from an apartment

Born in Havana to a distinguished family, Mendieta was one of thousands of Cuban children airlifted to the States after Castro came to power. She eventually became a sculptor and conceptual artist, who often used her own body as the basis of her work.

By the 1980's, she was receiving serious critical attention, and in 1985, she married famed minimalist sculptor Carl Andre (b. 1935). The marriage quickly turned sour, in part owing to Andre's infidelities. On the morning of September 8, 1985, Mendieta jumped, fell, or was pushed from Andre's 34th-floor apartment in Greenwich Village. Owing to his inconsistent explanations and forensic evidence indicating that Mendieta had not gone out the window of her own volition, Andre was charged with her murder.

After much legal maneuvering, he went on trial in 1988, waiving his right to a jury. The presiding judge acquitted him, and he walked free. The Mendieta case, which remains controversial in the art world, was examined in detail in a 1990 book by Robert Katz.