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.

One druggist commissioned Paul Gauguin to paint him a picture. "Only you know what, the point is to make the picture simple and clear," he said. In response, Gauguin, without a long thought, drew the "White Horse". Upon seeing the picture, the apothecary exclaimed: "Monsieur, but this horse is green! Have you even seen green horses?!" "Just recall how everything seems green, when you watch the sunset with half-closed eyes in the evening, sitting in a rocking chair," Gauguin retorted. "Well, no, that wasn't the agreement," persisted the druggist, "I need a picture to admire in the daylight with eyes wide open!" And even Gauguin found nothing to object.

The First President of the Royal Academy of Arts Joshua Reynolds had an obsessive tendency of retouching and reworking the paintings of his great colleagues. For example, during the study of Rembrandt's "Susanna and the Elders" in 2015, the restorers came to a shocking conclusion: a significant part of the canvas was repainted in the XVIII century, some areas were simply washed off with solvent and painted anew in a lighter palette, which was more fashionable at that period. Scientists believe that in this "barbarism" was engaged none other than Reynolds, as this kind of "editing" refers to the period when "Susanna and the Elders" was in his collection.

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!

When Pierre-Auguste Renoir was only four years old, his family moved to Paris and settled near the royal palace. No, they were not rich – it's just Paris was completely different in 1845. Back then, next to the palace, there still were houses built in the 16th century for the royal guard. Now, three centuries later, these houses were pretty worn out and the paint was peeling off. These houses became homes of very simple families, who weren’t accustomed to luxury and comfort: those of artisans and small traders. Their children played all day in the royal garden.
When Queen Maria Amalia was tired of the noise, she opened her window and treated little rascals to sweets. Thus, the queen managed to calm them down for a while and had a little quiet time.

This happened when Kandinsky was about 30 years old. After visiting Wagner's Opera Lohengrin in Moscow, he suddenly realized that he could "see" music. Later he wrote: "The violins, the deep tones of the basses, and especially the wind instruments at that time embodied for me all the power of that pre-nocturnal hour. I saw all my colours in my mind; they stood before my eyes. Wild, almost crazy lines were sketched in front of me." Shortly afterwards, Wassily Kandinsky decided to leave the legal profession and became an artist.

Lucian Freud said: "I paint people, not because of what they are like, not exactly in spite of what they are like, but how they happen to be." Quite a psychological statement, while the works that cost millions may be a subject for "Freudian" analysis. Lucian Freud led a bohemian lifestyle. By the time he died in 2011, he had been married twice, acknowledged 14 children by different women and had at least 50 lovers. At the end of 80, he created a nude portrait of Kate Moss and inked a tattoo on her lower back.

The projects of contemporary creators in Versailles are always bold. In the summer of 2015 in the gardens of the Palace of Versailles near Paris, there was installed a 60-meter steel sculpture, resembling a funnel – a project of the British-Indian artist Anish Kapoor. The sculpture is officially called The Dirty Corner (2011). However, the artist himself dubs the work the “queen's vagina”. He said that it symbolises "the vagina of the queen who took power". The work provoked angry criticism from conservative French commentators who criticized placing The Dirty Corner in such a historic place. This work of art was even subjected to the act of vandalism: the sculpture was spray-painted. The Dirty Corner had to be cleaned.

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.

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".

Apples are the landmark object in the Cézanne’s work. And the friendship of Paul Cézanne and Emil Zola began precisely with apples - the future writer, grateful for Paul’s intercession gave the future artist a whole basket of apples.
"He, Zola, was interested in absolutely nothing. He dreamed. He was absolutely unsociable, a kind of a melancholic destitute. You know, the kind of people guys usually hate. Without any reason, they bullied him. And this was the beginning of our friendship. The whole school, big guys and kids, gave me some kind of a swagger because I did not participate in their ostracism. I didn’t care about them, I came up and talked with him as usual. A nice friend. The next day he brought me a basket of apples. Here they are, Cézanne's apples!"

When Cézanne was passing the Saint-Lazare station on his way home, he met a stranger who asked him to show a sketch he was carrying. Having seen the landscape painting, the pale, skinny young man was amazed with its' unprecedented green colour, freshness, and artistic style. "If you like my trees that much, you can take them!" – said Cézanne. "I have nothing to pay with," answered the artist's new fan. Cézanne gave him the painting for free and both of them left the station completely happy.
Right from the station, happy Paul went to the studio, which he rented together with Renoir and Monet. "I've got a fan!" he solemnly declared from the doorway. That stranger appeared to be the poor composer and musician Ernest Cabaner, who was banned from all the cafés where he tried to play his own music.

Aivazovsky resourcefully attracted rich customers. Before the arrival of the guests, the artist's apprentice applied diluted ink or sepia-stains on paper with a sponge for some indeterminate outlines to emerge. Then Aivazovsky cut the paper into small pieces, stained the spots (still a brilliant brush!), to get quite spectacular seascapes with waves and clouds. They were inserted into the frame and presented to every noble person who visited the artist's studio. After that, the "flattered" visitor considered it his duty to buy a big picture from Aivazovsky for hundreds or even thousands of rubles.

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.

13-year-old Auguste felt like the church boys’ choir was where he belonged: large organ pipes hid him from the eyes of the worshippers, while he could see and feel everyone. Loaders, traders, workers and many others came to morning mass. "It was on a cold morning like that I understood Rembrandt," recalled Renoir later. He had a beautiful baritone, learned musical notation and performed complex passages. At that time, the regent of the choir and the church organist was Charles Gounod, still young and unknown (the opera Faust would appear only in 10 years). The regent was sure that Renoir stood a pretty good chance of becoming a famous opera singer. He gave the boy private lessons and persuaded his parents to choose a musical education for their son

Once, one of the Rubens' disciples fell onto a freshly painted canvas and damaged it, smudging the whole fragment. He asked another Rubens' disciple, the then unknown Anthony van Dyck, to redo that fragment. The next day Rubens was admiring his own (as he thought at first) painting ... And when the deception was revealed, he praised his disciple with the same admiration! Soon, van Dyck became Ruben's right-hand man and some customers were surprised at how the master's late works changed – as if the brush was sometimes held in someone else's hand! However, it is still uncertain which of Rubens' paintings were finished (or painted entirely) by van Dyck or his other disciples.

Critics liked to call the characters by the artist "cardboard dolls" or "lifeless caricatures". However, Seurat portrayed people in this way quite consciously, deliberately simplifying forms and styling figures following the spirit of flat Greek frescoes or Egyptian hieroglyphs. The artist chose such an image manner according to his philosophy: "I want to reduce the figures of modern people to their essence, make them move just like on frescoes by Phidias, and arrange them on the canvas in chromatic harmony."

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.

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.

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.