The "Retrospective Bust Of A Woman", created by Salvador Dalí in 1933 for the Surrealist exhibition in Pierre Colle Gallery (Paris) is quite original. On the porcelain bust of a woman, there is a loaf of bread (a surreal cap!) and a bronze ink-pot – the image of L'Angélus by Jean-Francois Millet. Plus, ants on the face, a paper "scarf", corn on the shoulders – well, just a parody of fashion! The original of which was spoiled... by the dog of Picasso. The artist visited the exhibition with his pet, and the dog devoured the loaf! The whole idea was actually wasted... Now its reconstruction with a fake loaf is in the Salvador Dalí Theater Museum in Figueres.

According to one of the legends, Raphael's beloved Fornarina was a commoner and led a very unjust way of life. The artist, sincerely fond of her, bought he from her father for 3 thousand gold coin. But Fornarina had affairs on other men and his students. After Raphael's death, she received a considerabe fortune under the will, but continued to be libertine, becoming one of the most famous Roman courtesans.
And according to another legend, Raphael and Fornarina sincerely loved each other, and after the death of the artist, Fornarina went to the monastery, where she soon died. Choose the version!

The Austrian Dieter Buchhart combined three generations of modernists in one exhibition "The Masters of Modernism: Edvard Munch, Peder Balke and Per Kirkeby", and showed their art quirks. Thus, the Norwegian artist Peder Balke (1804–1884), liked to draw not only with brushes but also with his fingers dipped in water and paint – he got special color transitions this way. And the famous Norwegian Edward Munch (1863–1944) often painted himself somewhere in the background of the picture, denoting his own presence on the canvases.

In 1564, the famous Italian artist Jacopo Tintoretto, cunningly won the Scuola Grande Di San Rocco commission. His competitors were the best Italian painters of that time, but Tintoretto successfully implemented the "multi-way combination": instead of a sketch, he presented a finished work Saint Roch. Moreover, knowing that the statute of the Scuola (school) di San Rocco forbids refusing gifts, the master wrote on his painting "to Saint Roch from Jacopo Tintoretto". They had no choice but to give the commission to the inventive artist! And he got something to do for the next 23 years: it took so much time to create 69 compositions.

Henri Matisse gained fame quickly, but his financial situation remained precarious. And only his acquaintance with Russian patrons and collectors Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov helped him to get out of poverty once and for all.
In 1908, an art connoisseur Sergei Shchukin commissioned him two panels, which he intended to hung on the walls of his Moscow mansion. It was then when the first Dance appeared. Shchukin invited Matisse to Russia, where the artist was completely overwhelmed by Russian icons.

A young singer became a model for the Christ in the famous Da Vinci’s painting. Then for another three years, Leonardo was looking for a model to depict Judas. And suddenly, when he saw a drunkard lying about in the gutter, the artist decided that it was the man to pose for Judas! He dragged his "find" into a tavern, where he immediately began to paint him as Judas. When the drunk man sobered up, he told the artist that he had already posed for him when he sang in the church choir: it was the same man who was da Vinci's model for Christ.

During his forced resignation in 1915, the famous British Prime Minister Winston Churchill fell into such a depression that his wife feared that he would commit suicide. This continued until his relative interested him in painting. Gradually, the Prime Minister not only forgot about depression, but also carried this passion throughout his life.

In 2015, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts issued an apology and cancelled a program, displaying Claude Monet's painting of his wife and giving the visitors the opportunity to put on a kimono similar to the one depicted in the painting, and encouraging them to pose for photographs. Before that, the painting La Japonaise. Camille Monet in Japanese Costume was shown all over Japan where the viewers posing in a kimono was an organic part of the special program. What could go wrong in America? And yet, an innocent event caused protest actions and accusations of cultural insensibility: some of the visitors noticed there "Orientalist flirtations with the exotic".

The author's copy of the famous "Portrait of Jacopo Foscarini", seized by the Nazis from art historian and collector August Liebmann Mayer, was kept in the Louvre since 1951. The picture, presumably, by Giovanni Batista Moroni was returned to the daughter of the owner, who died in a concentration camp, at a special ceremony at the Jewish Heritage Museum (New York, USA). The undisputed original work is stored in Budapest; it is a notable work in the artist's heritage.

During the Second World War, the famous fresco "The Last Supper" by Leonardo da Vinci, which was in Milan in the refectory of the Santa Maria del Grazie church, had a miraculous survival. The church was almost destroyed under bombs, three walls and the roof were blown away. And only the wall with the fresco by Leonardo stood unharmed in some incomprehensible way. The wall with the artist's fresco is the only thing left of the building.

A lot of artists tied themselves in knots trying to emulate Kuindzhi's palette. Speaking of the painting Ukrainian Night, Kramskoy wrote in a letter to Repin: "I'm a complete fool in front of this painting. The lighting on the white hut is so realistic that it tiresome for my eyes to look at it, as if it is real..." But the secret of Kuindzhi's palette was easier than it seemed. One day Kuindzhi (who was teaching at the Academy of Arts at the time) invited his friend Dmitry Mendeleev to his class. The latter brought a device estimating the spectral sensitivity of the human eye. Kuindzhi was far ahead of his young students in this indicator. He saw in a different way. Not in terms of creativity, but in the most literal physiological sense.

Having become famous and rich, Renoir still wore the same suit for 10 years, didn't tip waiters, but dispensed money to those deceived by notaries and other unfortunate ones who daily asked him for money for a sick child, a dying aunt or an innocently convicted husband. The artist's relatives protected him from those arrogant canters, therefore most often the “unfortunate” ones were waiting for him on his way from home to the studio. But for these cases, Madame Renoir came up with a protection scheme: seeing the beggar, the model would run to the studio, take her clothes off and quickly take a beautiful pose. Only the fear that his model would catch a cold could make Renoir quickly see the visitor off and light the fireplace, which he never lit for himself alone.

One of the treasures of the Matisse’s art collection was "Three Bathers" by Cezanne, he bought the picture from Ambroise Vollard (along with the bust of Rochefort) for fifteen hundred francs. Henri Matisse, with his flawless artist's flair, appreciated the Cézanne's "Bathers" even when the painter was considered an unsuccessful loser. Matisse fell in love with this picture, and neither his poverty and need, nor even his friends’ irony could reduce his admiration for Cézanne's masterpiece and make him sell it. In 1934, when an American collector offered the artist more than a million, Matisse refused to part with the canvas in a royal manner. A few years later, he made a royal gift to the Museum of Contemporary Art of France – the Cézanne’s “Bathers”.

Van Gogh's Sunflowers are fading. This was confirmed by experts who have studied the version of the painting from the artist’s museum in Amsterdam. The thing is that the artist used two differing yellow pigments in the work, one of which is extremely sensitive to light and is fading to a brownish colour over time as a result. It seems that the artist himself was all too aware that the colours in his work were transient. "Paintings fade like flowers," he wrote in a letter to his brother Theo. The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam has already lowered its galleries’ lighting in an attempt to slow the aging process of 200 paintings and 400 drawings by the artist.

With the beginning of the Franco-Prussian war, Mary Cassatt had to leave Paris and return to America. However, the Americans did not buy Cassatt's paintings. Two of her works were burned during the Great Chicago Fire of 1871... The artist got depressed and put her brushes off. Salvation came unexpectedly ant it was the Archbishop of Pittsburgh. He commissioned Mary copies of Correggio's paintings, located in Parma, and in 1871 Cassatt went to Italy. There she found out that her painting Two Women Throwing Flowers During Carnival was bought at the exhibition of the Paris Salon of 1872. A talented paintress came to light.

On one of the Paris boulevards an artist was working on his painting, having put an easel right on the street. Passers-by, used to such phenomena, now and then stopped nearby, looked over his shoulder, commented the painting in a low voice, and sometimes asked questions. A couple of Russian tourists watched for a long time how the bold, shining brushstrokes of the artist came to life on his canvas. One of them couldn't resist saying: "These French artists are so good at colour rendering!" "And the Russian ones are not worse! " – answered the first Russian Impressionist Konstantin Korovin.

At age 26, an American portraitist John Singer Sargent had a misfortune of meeting with a model Virginie Gautreau, a Frenchwoman, the wife of a large banker from Paris. The beauty, capable of very extravagant deeds, easily agreed to pose for the artist. But her full-growth portrait in a black dress, favorably emphasizing her curves, caused a real scandal in the Salon: everyone recognized the heroine of the "Portrait of the Lady X". In her profile, decorated with half-moon of the Roman goddess of hunting, the husband of the model saw a hint not at the majestic Diana, but at the hunting "hound", which sniffs, preparing to take the trail. At the behest of Pierre Gautreau, Sargent was accused of sexist attitudes and even immorality. As a result, the artist had to say goodbye to Paris.

Sometimes not only counterfeits get exposes, but also ... originals! "The Procuress" was considered a forgery by the great falsifier of paintings Hans van Meegeren (famous for his marvelous counterfeit "Vermeers") for a long time. However, after a detailed study, it was authenticated as the genuine picture created by the Dutchman Dirk van Bauburen in 1622. It was probably the first case of an unfairly "slandered" picture faker, who took up the illegal forgery of canvases in order to avenge the world for not recognizing his pictorial talent.

When Paul Cézanne didn't like his own painting, he would just throw it out of the window. The gardener Auguste Blanc told how the old trees growing under the windows of the artist's studio were hung with unfinished still lives. Sometimes Paul would think about some not completely hopeless sketches that had been hanging in the garden for several months – and put them back on his easel.
"Son, we must get down The Apples; I think I'll work on that study some more," he asked his son, who brought to Aix-en-Provence a French art dealer Ambroise Vollard for new paintings.

During the restoration of the Caravaggio’s "Bacchus", on the decanter, they found a vague reflection of a man – probably a self-portrait by Caravaggio. It is interesting that the glass decanter is to the right of the young god (posed by a famous model), and he holds his glass in his left hand. Apparently, the artist used a pinhole camera when creating a picture – an optical device for transferring an image of a real object to the surface, for example, a canvas. At the same time, the artist "transferred" himself.