ARTY-FACTS

In 1961, Matisse’s Le Bateau (The Boat) hung upside down for two months in New York’s Museum of Modern Art. The error went unnoticed by 116,000 visitors.

Picasso learned to draw before he could walk and his first word was ‘Piz’, short for lapiz the Spanish word for pencil. Later in life, when asked which of his paintings he liked the best, he replied ‘the next one’.

In 1994, Chicago artist Dwight Kalb sent David Letterman a statue of Madonna, made of 180 pounds of ham.

In his last days, the painter Auguste Renoir was so crippled with arthritis that his brushes were tied to his arms so that he could continue to paint.

The Maesa Elephant Camp in Thailand supervised eight elephants spreading paint around a huge canvas in 2005. It fetched £20,000 at auction.

The Discus Thrower by the fifth-century BC sculptor Myron, one of the most famous of all Greek statues, is not Greek at all. The various versions of the statue around the world are all assembled from pieces of a Roman copy of the Greek original.

The Mona Lisa used to hang on the wall of Napoleon’s bedroom. X-ray technology has shown there are three different versions of the Mona Lisa under the visible one.

And look closely at the Mona Lisa – there is a bridge in the background.

Congo the chimpanzee took up painting under the supervision of Dr Desmond Morris in the 1950s. His pieces were show at London’s Institute of Contemporary Art in 1957. Picasso and Miró were fans, and owned several of the chimp’s works. In 2005, three of Congo’s finest compositions went for the grand total of £14,400 at auction.

When first exhibited in 1878, Auguste Rodin’s statue The Bronze Period was considered so lifelike that onlookers suspected the sculptor had sacrificed a model to make the cast. He hadn’t. In 1917, Rodin died of frostbite – even though his statues were kept safely in warm museums, the French government had refused the artist financial help for a place to live.

Vincent Van Gogh sold just one painting in his lifetime. Red Vineyard at Arles went to his brother Theo, an art dealer. Vincent also cut his left ear off, yet his Self-Portrait with a Bandaged Ear depicts the right ear as injured. The reason? He was painting his mirror image.