Reading old paintings: symbols, perspective and anachronism

24 questions · by Quizbun

Paintings made before 1900 were meant to be read. A sleeping dog means fidelity, a lamp that has just gone out means time is up, and a vanishing point tells you where the painter wanted you to stand. Each question shows a real painting or a detail from one and asks what it told the people who first saw it: hidden skulls, saints' attributes, moral jokes, impossible bouquets and Bible stories set in the painter's own street.

Start

Questions

Not answered. This painting is called Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. Where is Icarus?
Not answered. A long pale smear floats above the floor between the two men in Holbein's The Ambassadors. What is it?
Not answered. Which of these can you find in or around the convex mirror on the back wall of the Arnolfini Portrait?
Not answered. Many first-time viewers assume the woman in the Arnolfini Portrait is pregnant. What do art historians usually conclude?
Not answered. In Steenwyck's still life, which objects stand for death and passing time, and not for the pleasures that death cuts short?
Not answered. In the Dutch paintings Chardin learned from, a soap bubble was a stock symbol. What did it usually stand for?
Not answered. Which of these help explain why Simone Martini set this Annunciation against solid gold instead of a sky or a room?
Not answered. Why are the kneeling people in Piero della Francesca's Madonna of Mercy so much smaller than the Virgin who shelters them?
Not answered. Why does the Christ Child in Berlinghiero's thirteenth-century Madonna and Child look like a small, serious adult?
Not answered. Why is the Virgin's mantle so often an intense blue, as in Sassoferrato's Virgin in Prayer?
Not answered. In Leonardo's Last Supper, the ceiling beams and the tops of the wall hangings all recede toward one point. Where is it?
Not answered. Masaccio painted this chapel onto a flat church wall around 1425–28. Where did he place the vanishing point, and what did that do for a visitor?
Not answered. Which saint did Raphael paint here?
Not answered. Francesco del Cossa's saint holds up a slender stem with something odd at its tip. What is it, and why?
Not answered. Which details in Antonello da Messina's painting identify the scholar at the desk as Saint Jerome?
Not answered. Which of these pairings of object and meaning fit Crivelli's Annunciation?
Not answered. Why has Crivelli moved the Annunciation to a busy fifteenth-century Italian street, with a local bishop showing Gabriel a model of a town?
Not answered. A small dog sleeps curled at the feet of Titian's Venus of Urbino. What did such a dog usually signify in Renaissance painting?
Not answered. Why could this bouquet by Ambrosius Bosschaert never have stood on a real table?
Not answered. In Vermeer's The Love Letter, a seascape with a sailing ship hangs on the wall behind the two women. What does it add?
Not answered. Which details in Jan Steen's Beware of Luxury warn about where this household is heading?
Not answered. Hogarth's The Tête à Tête shows a young aristocratic couple shortly after their wedding. Which details show the marriage is already failing?
Not answered. There is a bare, unfinished patch on Mrs Andrews's lap. What was supposed to go there?
Not answered. Which of these statements about Rembrandt's Night Watch are true?