The main source of biographical information about Caravaggio – police and court records: there's at least one murder and countless fights under the belt of the Italian genius. One of these recorded fights gives reason to think that Caravaggio was not only a thug who should have been sent to anger management courses, but also a gourmet.
It happened in the tavern. A waiter served Caravaggio and two of his friends a large earthenware dish with eight artichokes: half of them were fried in oil and half – in butter. Caravaggio asked which were which: perhaps for him it was as important as light and shadow. The waiter shrugged and suggested that Caravaggio should sniff the artichokes to find out for himself. Caravaggio immediately leapt up, hit him with an earthenware dish and drew his ever-ready sword.

At the meetings of the young artists (future Impressionists) at Café Guerbois, Cézanne was a strange participant: he would break in all messy, wheeze, greet everyone, make a few rude jokes and then sit in silence listening to conversations about new art. When he didn’t like something said, he would just get up loudly and leave. When asked by the elegant painter Edouard Manet what he would show at the next Salon, Cézanne answered: "a pot of shit".
Every time, the judges of the Salon would squeamishly wait for this madman to bring his new masterpieces in a rattling truck or carrying them on his back. They got used to it. Cézanne would repeat that trick for 18 years until in 1882 his painting was accepted at the Salon.

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.

The paintings of Artemisia Gentileschi, an Italian artist of the 17th century, are full of drama. The artist herself experienced a tragedy: the Florentine artists Agostino Tassi, in whose workshop she studied, raped his young student. Artemisia filed lawsuit against him and experienced a humiliating public hearing, ending with a mild one-year jail sentence for Tassi. Disappointed, but not subdued, the artist rendered justice in her paintings: she depicted the main characters of her paintings Jael and Sisera and Judith Slaying Holofernes with Agostino Tassi's face.

Born in Parma and known as Parmigianino in honour of his hometown, Francesco Mazzola (1503-1540) lived only 37 years. During his lifetime, he was called the "reincarnation of Raphael" and was revered for his great talent. Thus, in 1527, the mercenaries of Charles V captured Rome, while Parmigianino was working on the altar image, "The Vision of Saint Jerome". The soldiers burst into the workshop, but when they saw the artist at work, they did not touch him or the pictures. However, later they employed him much with extra work... Moreover, the artist also burned with passion for alchemy, and this caused his delay of an important commission from the church community of Santa Maria della Steccata, and was taken into custody. After the release, he immediately left Parma, but did not abandon his addiction.

Ilya Repin was almost painfully stingy. Having learnt that tram tickets in St. Petersburg cost five kopecks in the morning, and ten kopecks in the afternoon, the artist tried to come to the city early in the morning. And when his daughter Vera needed massage sessions, Repin said a truly "brilliant" sentence: "You call the masseuse once, remember the massage techniques, and massage yourself then!".

Once Auguste Renoir and Édouard Manet painted next to each other. They stayed in Claude Monet's house in Argenteuil and set up their easels in the garden, while the owner was doing his chores. After this joint plein-air, Édouard Manet, rather embarrassingly, asked Claude to somehow suggest Renoir to quit painting. The poor fellow had no talent at all!

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.

In 1993, the Tretyakov Gallery acquired Levitan's Portrait of a Little Boy Joseph Levin, made in the early 1880s. That 6-year-old boy with an inquisitive look would become a celebrity during Levitan's lifetime: Joseph Levin would later become a famous pianist Josef Lhévinne. Due to his extraordinary abilities, he would be taken to the senior "professorial" class of the Moscow Conservatory; he would be the first in his class, leaving his classmates Rachmaninoff and Scriabin behind. Later Joseph would go to Dresden to study under Anton Rubinstein, and in 1919 he would move to New York, where he would close his days, leaving a lot of grateful students and a short book Basic Principles in Pianoforte Playing, that is considered a classic of musical and pedagogical literature.

One of the finest and most famous works created by Alfons Mucha is a gold bracelet called Médée Snake. The snake wrapped around the ring wraps the wrist, and the snake's sting passes into the ring through a thin chain. For the first time the image of this bracelet appeared on the playbill for the Médée play. The actress liked it so much that she commissioned jeweller to create a snake bracelet and a ring embellished with gemstones for her to wear on stage. This bracelet shows that his creator was an artist, for the beautiful decoration has no practical application. After all, in the world, there is no such thin and elegant hand, on which it could be put on! The Médée Snake is called "jewelery of the century".

Botticelli was unhappy in love and never married, because he was in love with Simonetta Vespucci, the first beauty of the Renaissance era, dubbed La Sans Pareille. She became a model of the famous painting "The Birth of Venus", her image was also on other canvases by the master. Unfortunately, Simonetta never belonged to him: she was the wife of Marco Vespucci (the cousin of the famous Florentine navigator Amerigo Vespucci!) and the beloved of the younger brother of the Florentine ruler Giuliano Medici. However, it didn’t make Simonetta’s fate happy. The beauty, which made crazy all the noble men of the city, died of tuberculosis at the age of 23. Botticelli was buried next to Simonetta in the church of Ognisanti 34 years after her death, according to the will of the creator.

Leon Bakst came to the conclusion about the advantages of lecturing over creating paintings in 1923, after delivering at the Plaza Hotel his most famous lecture on fashion and design L'art du Costume et les lois, ces applications selon toute individualité. Bakst was paid 2,000 US dollars for this lecture. Its text was published in Vogue magazine. Bakst really enjoyed it and wrote to his sister that he craved more lectures like that: "This is like Chaliapin’s tour – pleasant and much easier than painting."

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.

Frida Kahlo created her biggest and most difficult piece, The Wounded Table, in 1940, experiencing a divorce from Diego Rivera. Being a dedicated Communist, she sent the work to the USSR as "a gift of friendship", but Soviet officials considered it to be an example of "decadent bourgeois formalist art" and unsuitable for public display. In 1955, the painting was shown in Poland in an exhibition, but on the way back to Moscow The Wounded Table disappeared as if into thin air. Years of searching in Europe and America have been unsuccessful. The painting remains the "Holy Grail" for art historians, studying Frida Kahlo's work.

Certainly, the great artist did not do it on purpose. During his voyage to Etretat, a place in Normandy with the most beautiful cliffs in France, Monet was fascinated by the views. So much so that, carried away by his work, he did not notice how the tide began. The water came so quickly that the artist himself almost died, but the almost completed landscape had no chance to survive, it drowned in the risen water. However, Monet made up with the landscapes. As recalled Guy de Maupassant who saw him then: "I often followed Claude Monet when he wandered around searching impression. In those moments, he seemed to be not an artist, but a real hunter. He always had 5 or 6 canvases with him, carried by pleasured local children... He took one or another canvas, according to the changing conditions. Sometimes the artist waited for a long time for suitable weather."

Yvette Guilbert, the Moulin Rouge cabaret singer, hugely impressed the artist Toulouse-Lautrec. He told all his friends about her, took them to concerts, and didn't miss her single performance himself. Once, Toulouse-Lautrec made a charcoal sketch for a poster and sent it to Guilbert with a proposal for collaboration. That sketch was cruel and striking, offensive and sensitive. Guilbert was ready to print the poster, but it turned out that she was the only one who wanted to do it. Her friends and family were offended by that ugly, grotesque caricature, and her entrepreneur threatened to break the contract. Soon Guilbert and Lautrec met in person. He conceived a 14-page album of lithographs dedicated to her – and she agreed to pose. The album appeared to be scandalous – this time the outraged friends recommended Yvette to sue Lautrec without hesitation. Instead, she put her signature on each copy of the album.

According to the memories of his relatives, the first word of the baby Pablo Picasso was the word "pencil". When the boy grew up, his father began to take his son with him to college, where he taught drawing. And, one day, Picasso’s father for some reason was allegedly called from the office, where he was working on a painting depicting pigeons. On return, he found that the young Pablo finished the picture. The mastery of the 13-year-old son shocked his father so much that he gave Pablo his palette and brush, and since then he no longer came to easel.

In 2015, a geologist and art historian Ann Pizzorusso questioned the attribution of the painting Virgin of the Rocks from National Gallery in London to Leonardo da Vinci. It was all about... flowers. The flora in the Louvre version of the piece is painted as perfectly as possible, while the British version contains some irregularly-shaped and unidentifiable flowers. It is unlikely that one and the same person could paint a grotto so neatly in one work and so unnaturally in another. Especially when taking into account Leonardo being immersed in the comprehension of nature and depicting it. By the way, the London painting had long been considered a work of the master’s students and da Vinci's authorship was asserted only in 2010. And the National Gallery refused to comment on a new research.

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".

William Turner's love of money was widely known and became the subject of many jokes. One of them was described by the artist's biographer George Walter Thornbury. When Turner arrived in Yorkshire, he brought the bookseller Robinson a sealed letter of recommendation from London Longman publishers. It was written there that “Above all things remember that Turner is the Great Jew.” Most likely, it was about his commerciality, but Robinson took everything literally. He would loudly assume that the guest would not want to go to church on Sunday and apologize when pork was served at the table.