Art history is full of stories that never make it onto the gallery placard. Behind every masterpiece is a human — often a strange, brilliant, occasionally unhinged human — and the stories are almost always better than you’d expect.
Here are 25 facts that will make your next museum visit a lot more interesting.
The paintings
1. The Mona Lisa has no eyebrows. Not because da Vinci forgot — it was fashionable in Renaissance Florence for women to shave them off. Some art historians believe she originally had them, but they were accidentally removed during an early cleaning.
2. Starry Night was painted from memory. Van Gogh created it while in an asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, working from his memory of the view from his window. The village in the painting doesn’t match the actual landscape.
3. Picasso could draw before he could talk. According to his mother, his first word was “piz” — short for lápiz, the Spanish word for pencil.
4. A Matisse painting hung upside down in a museum for 47 days. In 1961, Le Bateau was installed upside down at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. About 116,000 people walked past it before anyone noticed.
5. The Last Supper is deteriorating because da Vinci experimented. Instead of using traditional fresco techniques, Leonardo tried a new method with oil paints on dry plaster. It started peeling within years of completion.
The artists
6. Michelangelo didn’t want to paint the Sistine Chapel. He considered himself a sculptor, not a painter, and initially refused the commission. Pope Julius II essentially forced him into it.
7. Claude Monet almost went blind. He had cataracts that changed how he saw color, which is why his later paintings shift toward reds and yellows. After surgery, he was reportedly horrified by the “true” colors and repainted several works.
8. Frida Kahlo’s first self-portrait was a gift to an ex-boyfriend. After he broke up with her, she painted Self-Portrait in a Velvet Dress to win him back. It didn’t work — but it launched her career.
9. Salvador Dalí avoided paying restaurant bills by drawing on the back of checks. He knew the restaurants would keep the checks as art rather than cashing them. Genius or fraud? Both.
10. Banksy shredded his own painting the moment it sold at auction. In 2018, Girl with Balloon self-destructed in a hidden shredder built into the frame, right as the hammer fell at Sotheby’s. The shredded version later sold for even more.
The surprises
11. The oldest known painting is over 45,000 years old. It’s a depiction of a wild pig in a cave on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. Humans have been making art since before we left Africa.
12. The color ultramarine was once more expensive than gold. Made from lapis lazuli imported from Afghanistan, it was so costly that Renaissance painters reserved it for the most important subjects — usually the Virgin Mary’s robe.
13. There’s a painting inside the Statue of Liberty. Well, sort of — the original copper surface has developed a patina that art historians argue functions as a living painting that changes over centuries.
14. The world’s most stolen painting is the Ghent Altarpiece. It has been stolen 13 times since it was completed in 1432. Parts of it were seized by Napoleon, hidden from the Nazis, and recovered from a salt mine.
15. Bob Ross painted over 30,000 paintings. He produced an estimated 30,000 paintings during his career, many of them during episodes of The Joy of Painting. Most are in storage and have never been sold.
The materials
16. Many Renaissance paintings contain real gold. Gold leaf was applied to halos, backgrounds, and decorative elements. If you look closely at medieval and early Renaissance paintings, the shimmer is real metal.
17. Tyrian purple dye was made from sea snails. It took 10,000 snails to produce 1 gram of dye. This is why purple became associated with royalty — only the very rich could afford it.
18. Mummy brown was a real paint color. From the 16th to 19th century, painters used a pigment made from ground-up Egyptian mummies. When Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones found out, he gave his tube a proper burial.
19. Vantablack, the world’s blackest paint, caused a feud among artists. When one artist secured exclusive rights to the pigment, another created the world’s pinkest pink and banned that artist from using it.
20. Spider silk has been used to make art. A golden cape made from the silk of over a million Madagascar golden orb spiders took eight years to create and is displayed at the Victoria and Albert Museum.
The museums
21. The Louvre has 380,000 objects but only displays 35,000. Less than 10% of its collection is visible at any time. The rest is in storage or on loan.
22. You’d need 100 days to spend 30 seconds with every piece in the Met. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has over 2 million works in its collection.
23. Some museums have “secret” rooms. The Vatican has rooms that are closed to the public containing works considered too controversial or fragile for general viewing.
24. The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum still displays empty frames. After a 1990 heist — the largest unsolved art theft in history — the museum kept the empty frames on the walls as placeholders, waiting for the paintings’ return.
25. Many museums have paintings they know are forgeries. Some are kept on display because they’re such good forgeries they’ve become historically interesting in their own right. The forger becomes the artist.
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