Due to years of aging & darkened canvas, this painting came to be called XY. However, in reality both X & Y are incorrect. The painting is supposed to be a day time scene & the subjects are a civic guard.
The original name of the painting ‘Militia Company of District II under the Command of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq’ and is one of the most famous Dutch Golden Age paintings.
Identify the painting.
Show AnswerThe Night Watch, a 1642 painting by Rembrandt van Rijn
Watch a Nerdwriter Video on why it is so popular.
Or Zoom Infinitely into the painting to see its aging.
Tag: Art
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In October 2018, an artwork was sold for £1m at London auction house Sotheby’s. However, as soon as the gavel hit the sound-block, the artwork was (partially) destroyed through a remote control mechanism.
The stunt was called “the first artwork in history to have been created live during an auction”. Also, the price of the work increased almost 18-fold in just 3 years.
Can you identify the artist behind this?
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Originally called Der Schrei der Natur, this iconic painting was completed in 1893.
There have been many speculations about the inspiration behind the painting, ranging from: the powerful volcanic eruption at Karkatoa, Stratospheric clouds, to admission of the painter’s sister to a mental asylum.
Can you guess the painting?
Show AnswerThe Scream by Edward Munch. The painting has been called an expression of anxiety of the human condition.
While there are a lot of speculations about the inspiration, there is no common consensus.
Read More about the theories.
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Following a rather tepid album release in 1986, influential English artist X had a bit of a brainwave and released a seventh solo album titled (in Cyrillic) СНОВА В СССР in 1988, consisting entirely of live-in-studio covers of older (English) rock and roll songs, and distributed only in the Soviet Union on the Soviet government-run Melodiya label.
Soon after, though, copies of the album began popping up outside the Soviet bloc (which, in a way, had been X’s initial intention), going for anywhere between $100-$250 in the US and up to £500 in the UK. This eventually led to a global release of the album in 1991, notably with the title misprinted as “СНОВА Б СССР”.
Who is X?
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St. Burchardi Church is a nearly thousand-year old church in Halberstadt, Germany, just a short walk away from the famed Halberstadt Cathedral.
On February 5, 2024, fans flocked to the church to bear witness to a moment they’d been waiting for for two years. Another such moment is expected to occur in 2026, and there will be quite a few more after that.
What’s going on behind that unassuming stone face?
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Santa Maria delle Grazie (“Holy Mary of Grace”) is a lovely, if initially unassuming, 15th-century terracotta-stone church and convent located in Milan, Italy. While every brick of the church is rightly regarded as an architectural and artistic jewel, there’s something special about the north wall in the dining hall that led to the building’s designation as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
On the night of August 15, 1943, an Allied aerial strike partly destroyed the site — that north wall was one of the few left standing, having been protected since the start of World War II by sandbags and scaffolding.
Why is that wall so important?