Art Quiz — 50 Questions, No Pictures Needed

What makes fresco different from painting on a wall in oils?

Answer Pigment is laid into wet plaster and becomes part of the wall as it sets

In true fresco the pigment goes into wet plaster and becomes part of the wall as it dries. That sets a hard deadline: the painter can only lay as much plaster as can be finished that day, and those day-sections are still visible as faint seams.

Traditional egg tempera binds its pigment with what?

Answer Egg yolk thinned with water

Egg yolk thinned with water. It dries within minutes, so color cannot be blended wet — tempera painters build tone with fine parallel strokes instead, which is why the surface looks hatched up close.

Why did oil paint change what painters could do?

Answer It dries slowly, so colors can be blended on the surface and built in transparent layers

Oil dries slowly, so colors can be blended on the surface and adjusted for days. That single property made soft transitions, deep shadow and reworking possible, and it is why the medium displaced tempera across Europe.

What is a glaze in oil painting?

Answer A thin transparent layer laid over dry paint so the color beneath shows through

A thin transparent layer laid over dry paint. Light passes through it and reflects off what is underneath, so a glazed color glows in a way a mixed one cannot — which is the effect that makes old master flesh tones so hard to imitate.

What is impasto?

Answer Paint left thick enough that the brush or knife marks stay visible

Paint left thick enough to hold the mark of the brush or knife. It catches real light and casts real shadow, so an impasto passage changes as you move past it — a painting doing something a photograph of it cannot.

In an etching, what actually makes the line that prints?

Answer Acid bites a groove into the metal plate where the ground has been scratched away

Acid bites the line into the plate; the artist only draws through a protective coating. That is why an etched line can be so free — the hand is moving through soft ground rather than cutting metal.

And lithography works on what principle?

Answer Grease and water repel each other, so ink sticks only to the drawn areas

Grease and water repel each other. The image is drawn in a greasy medium, the stone is wetted, and the ink sticks only where the grease is. Nothing is carved, which is why lithography can reproduce a drawing so directly.

Why is watercolor usually described as unforgiving?

Answer The paper shows through, so lifting a dark passage back to white is largely impossible

The white is the paper, not the paint. Once an area is dark, lifting it back cleanly is difficult, so watercolor is planned in reverse — deciding what to leave alone before deciding what to put down.

What is gesso for?

Answer Preparing a panel or canvas so it is smooth, sealed and ready to take paint

Gesso prepares the surface so it is smooth and absorbent enough to take paint evenly. Skipping it means the support drinks the binder unevenly, and the color sinks in patches.

Bronze sculpture is usually made by lost-wax casting. What is lost?

Answer A wax model, melted out of the mold so molten bronze can take its place

The wax model is lost — melted out of the mold to leave the cavity the bronze fills. Each casting destroys the original wax, which is why bronzes are usually made in editions from a reusable master.

What did the Impressionists actually do differently?

Answer Painted the changing effects of light in loose visible strokes, and exhibited outside the official Salon

They painted the changing effects of light rather than the fixed local color of things. Paint sold in metal tubes had just made it practical to work outdoors, and the movement is partly a consequence of that piece of equipment.

Where did the word Impressionism come from?

Answer A critic borrowed it from the title of a Monet painting, and it was not meant kindly

A critic took it from the title of a Monet canvas and used it as an insult. The painters adopted the word, which is a common pattern — several movement names started as complaints.

What is the central idea of Cubism?

Answer Showing an object from several viewpoints at once, broken into planes

Showing an object from several viewpoints at once, flattened into one image. It abandons the single fixed eye that perspective had assumed for four centuries, which is why it looked like vandalism at the time.

Surrealism drew its program from where?

Answer Dreams and the unconscious, with imagery arranged by association rather than logic

Dreams and the unconscious, with a manifesto to match. The aim was images assembled by association rather than by design, which is why so much Surrealist work looks precisely painted and impossible at the same time.

What marks Baroque painting out from the Renaissance work before it?

Answer Drama: strong diagonals, theatrical light, and figures caught mid-movement

Drama: strong diagonals, theatrical light, figures caught mid-movement. Renaissance composition tends toward balance and stillness; Baroque wants you to arrive one second after something happened.

What was new about Abstract Expressionism?

Answer Very large canvases where the act of painting itself is the subject

Very large canvases where the act of painting is part of the subject. Scale is essential to it — reproduced small, the work loses the physical relationship to the viewer's body that it was built around.

Pop Art took its material from where?

Answer Advertising, packaging, comics and celebrity images from everyday commercial life

Advertising, packaging, comics and celebrity. The provocation was not the technique but the choice of subject: it insisted that the imagery people actually saw all day was fit material for a gallery.

Ukiyo-e woodblock prints influenced European painters in the nineteenth century. What did they take from them?

Answer Flat areas of color, bold cropping, and compositions that ignore Western perspective

Flat areas of color, bold cropping, and unfamiliar viewpoints. Japanese prints arrived in Europe partly as packing material, and their influence is visible in composition long before anyone tried to imitate the subjects.

What does a still life show, and what is the point of it?

Answer Arranged inanimate objects, often chosen so the arrangement carries a meaning of its own

Arranged inanimate objects. The genre was long ranked low precisely because nothing happens in it, which is also what makes it a pure demonstration of light, surface and composition.

What is a triptych?

Answer A work in three panels, usually hinged so the outer two fold over the center

Three panels, usually hinged so the outer ones close over the center. The form comes from altarpieces, where the closed exterior showed one image and opening it revealed another for feast days.

Where does the Mona Lisa hang?

Answer The Louvre, in Paris

The Louvre, in Paris. Much of its fame dates from a 1911 theft: it was missing for two years, and crowds came to look at the empty space on the wall.

Who painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel?

Answer Michelangelo

Michelangelo, who took the commission reluctantly and thought of himself as a sculptor rather than a painter. He worked standing on scaffolding, not lying down — the lying-on-his-back image is a later invention.

The Night Watch is by which painter?

Answer Rembrandt

Rembrandt. The painting is not a night scene at all: darkened varnish gave it that name, and it was also trimmed on all sides in 1715 to fit a smaller wall, so figures at the left edge are simply gone.

What is unusual about The Scream as an object?

Answer Munch made several versions, in different media, rather than one single picture

Munch made several versions in different media, so there is no single original. Two were stolen in separate thefts and both were recovered, which has kept the image in the news for reasons unrelated to art.

Guernica was painted in response to what?

Answer The bombing of a town during the Spanish Civil War

The bombing of a Basque town during the Spanish Civil War. It is painted entirely in gray, black and white — refusing color for a subject that had been photographed and printed in newspapers.

Frida Kahlo's paintings are dominated by which subject?

Answer Herself, in self-portraits that carry her injuries, politics and heritage

Herself. She painted self-portraits through decades of physical pain following a bus accident, and the work reads as a record kept by someone with a great deal of time in bed and a mirror above it.

What did Katsushika Hokusai make his name with?

Answer Woodblock prints, including a celebrated series of views of Mount Fuji

Woodblock prints, including the wave off Kanagawa. He was around seventy when he made that series, and he wrote that he expected his work to become worth something only after ninety.

Vincent van Gogh's reputation during his own lifetime was what?

Answer Almost nonexistent commercially; he sold very little and depended on his brother

Almost nonexistent commercially. He sold very little in his lifetime and was supported by his brother, which is the gap between an artist's living circumstances and later reputation in its most extreme form.

What is a Fabergé egg?

Answer An elaborately jewelled Easter egg made by a Russian court workshop

An elaborately jeweled Easter egg made for the Russian imperial family. Around fifty were made for the court and several are still unaccounted for, which is why one occasionally surfaces at a flea market and makes the news.

Georgia O'Keeffe is best known for what?

Answer Large close-up flowers and the landscape of the American Southwest

Large close-up flowers and the landscape of New Mexico. She rejected the sexual readings applied to the flowers throughout her life, which is worth mentioning because those readings are still repeated as if she agreed.

What did linear perspective give European painters?

Answer A geometric method for making a flat surface read as receding space

A geometric method for making a flat surface read as depth. It was worked out in fifteenth-century Florence and written down as rules, which is why it spread so fast — it could be taught rather than merely admired.

What is a vanishing point?

Answer The point on the horizon where lines that are parallel in reality appear to meet

The point on the horizon where parallel lines appear to meet. Its height tells you where the viewer is standing, so moving it up or down changes whether you look down on a scene or up into it.

What does chiaroscuro describe?

Answer Strong contrast between light and dark used to model form and set a mood

Strong contrast between light and dark. Pushed to an extreme it becomes tenebrism, where figures emerge from near-total darkness — the effect Caravaggio made his own and half of Europe then copied.

Why do a red and a green placed side by side both look more intense?

Answer They sit opposite each other on the color wheel, and each makes the other read as stronger

They sit opposite each other on the color wheel, and the eye exaggerates the difference at the boundary. The effect is in the viewer rather than the pigment, which is why it disappears if you separate the two colors.

What is negative space?

Answer The shape of the emptiness around and between the objects, which can be composed too

The shape of the emptiness around and between things. Learning to see it is a standard drawing exercise because the eye insists on naming objects, and the gaps are usually more accurate than the names.

What does scale do to a viewer?

Answer It sets the physical relationship: a wall-sized canvas surrounds you, a small one asks you to lean in

Scale sets the physical relationship between the work and your body. A wall-sized canvas surrounds you and a small panel asks you to come close, and both effects vanish in reproduction — which is why so many famous paintings surprise people in person.

A figure is placed slightly off center and looking out of the frame. What is that doing?

Answer Creating tension and implying that something exists outside the picture

It creates tension and implies that something exists outside the frame. Centering settles a picture; offsetting it and directing the gaze outward keeps the composition unresolved on purpose.

What is a study, as distinct from a finished work?

Answer A preparatory drawing or sketch made to work out a part of the problem

A study is preparatory — made to work something out rather than to be shown. They are often more admired now than the finished works, because they show the decisions rather than the conclusion.

Why does the frame matter?

Answer It separates the work from the wall and shapes how the picture is read, and it is often not the artist's choice

The frame separates the work from the wall and tells you where to stop looking. It is also an interpretation: a heavy gilt frame and a plain white one put the same painting in two different centuries.

What is the difference between an original print and a reproduction?

Answer A print is made by the artist as the artwork itself; a reproduction is a photograph of something else

An original print is made by the artist as the artwork itself — the plate or block is the work's origin. A reproduction is a photograph of something else, however well printed, and the distinction is the whole basis of the print market.

Why was ultramarine blue so expensive before the nineteenth century?

Answer It was ground from lapis lazuli, mined far away, and the good grade cost about as much as gold

It was ground from lapis lazuli, mined in what is now Afghanistan and carried across the world. It cost more than gold by weight, which is why contracts specified how much of it a painter had to use and where.

Old varnish makes a painting look warmer and browner. Why?

Answer The varnish itself yellows and darkens with age; the paint underneath has not changed as much

The varnish itself yellows and darkens with age, so you are looking through an amber film. Cleaning can be dramatic and controversial, because the warm tone people grew up with turns out not to be the painting.

What is craquelure?

Answer The network of fine cracks that forms as paint and ground age and move

The network of fine cracks that forms as paint and support age at different rates. Its pattern depends on the materials and the climate, so it is also one of the things a forger finds hardest to fake convincingly.

What can infrared imaging show a conservator?

Answer The underdrawing beneath the paint, including changes the artist made while working

The underdrawing beneath the paint. Infrared passes through many pigments and reflects off carbon black, so the artist's first plan — including parts later painted over — becomes visible.

A picture said to be from the seventeenth century contains a pigment first manufactured in the twentieth. What follows?

Answer The paint layer cannot be as old as claimed, whatever the style suggests

The paint layer cannot be as old as claimed. A pigment first manufactured in the twentieth century cannot appear in a seventeenth-century painting, and this kind of dating has undone a number of famous attributions.

Why are works on paper displayed under much dimmer light than oil paintings?

Answer Light damage to paper and its inks accumulates and cannot be reversed

Light damage to paper and inks is cumulative and cannot be reversed. A work on paper is usually shown for a limited period and then rested in the dark for years, which is why the same drawings are rarely on view.

What does pentimento mean?

Answer A visible trace of something the artist painted and then changed their mind about

A visible trace of something the artist changed. As paint thins with age, an earlier position of an arm or a head can resurface, and the word means repentance in Italian.

Why is provenance — the ownership history — so important?

Answer It supports the claim that a work is genuine and that it was not looted or stolen along the way

It supports the claim that a work is genuine and legally owned. Gaps in the record matter twice over — they weaken the attribution, and they are where wartime looting tends to sit.

Why do museums keep galleries at a steady temperature and humidity?

Answer Wood, canvas and paint swell and shrink at different rates, and repeated movement cracks the paint

Wood, canvas and paint swell and shrink with humidity, and they do it at different rates. It is the change rather than the level that does the damage, which is why stability matters more than any particular number.

Modern conservation prefers repairs that can be undone later. Why?

Answer Because judgment and technique change, and a future conservator should be able to reverse this one's work

Because judgment and technique change, and today's repair may be tomorrow's mistake. Reversibility keeps the decision with the future rather than closing it off — the same principle that keeps original bones out of museum mounts.