Leonardo da Vinci: without sleep, but with ciphers
Leonardo encoded personal messages as well as records of his inventions. Perhaps, the master believed that humanity is not yet ready for this information, which meant hiding all discoveries in puzzles for future generations. In addition, the artist loved to leave the work unfinished, for incompleteness implies continuation. While a painting is not finished, it is still alive.
Salvador Dali: dreams and reality with no borders
It is unlikely that his strangeness was a far-fetched commercial image of Dali. Rather, thanks to his muse Gala, he managed to turn his flaws into virtues, making fads an advantage.
Perhaps, the artist needed flies for some kind of installation. After all, Jan Fabre has made a series of art works made of the beetles' wings. Dali could well have anticipated the trend to use insects for art!
Picasso: shooting but not on pigeons
Henri Matisse: the main thing is to be safe
Matisse had some few oddities, as for an artist. The most notable was his fear to be a cast-off. The master was afraid to lose his sight, so he learned to play the violin to work as a street musician, if needed.
In general, Matisse did not have any other obvious quirks, except for his vivid dislike for the art dealer Ambroise Vollard.
Andy Warhol: cold as ice
When Andy Warhol has heard that his friend, Fred Herko, a regular visitor to the ‘Factory', committed suicide by throwing himself from one of its windows, his reaction was baffling and cold, "I wish Freddy had told us about his plans; we could have filmed it."
By the way, you should definitely remember the famous Campbell soup can, eternalized by Warhol. When Andy has become a wealthy man, he still could not deny himself the pleasure to dine this 5-cent soup and often ate it straight from a jar.
Caravaggio: the offender throughout
Illustration: alleged self-portrait of the artist, playing role of a Bacchus.
Michael Vrubel: a pest for himself
Suffering from unrequited love, Vrubel has cutting himself with a knife. Emilia, the lady of his heart, was a wife of an archaeologist and culturologist Adrian Prakhov, who supervised the frescoes painting in the Vladimir Cathedral in Kiev.
Feelings have passed, but scars remained, as well as the portrait of Emilia in the image of the Virgin Mary, which is in the church of St. Cyril.
Antonio Gaudi: contempt for the material world
In his final years, the great architect was so carried away by his eternal work that he stopped to take care of his clothes and ignored surrounding world in general. It was strange, because in his youth Gaudi was famous both for his talent and for his impeccable style, costumes and habit of traveling around construction sites on his own cortege.His body was buried in the crypt of the edifice of the Sagrada Familia, which has been constructed since 1882 and continues to this day.