The stories, symbols and history behind great art
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They are not husband and wife, the models were the artist's sister and his dentist, and the house still stands in a small town in Iowa. The facts behind one of America's most parodied images.
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Jan van Eyck signed the wall, painted two tiny visitors into a mirror and left a question that is still open: who are the man and woman in the room?
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In 1601 Caravaggio painted the moment Christ is recognised at Emmaus with drama and bright colour. Five years later, after fleeing Rome, he painted it again, quieter and darker.
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For more than 250 years, Vermeer's letter reader stood before a bare wall. A restoration in Dresden showed that the wall once held a painting of Cupid, and that Vermeer was not the one who covered it.
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She is not a portrait, the pearl has no hook and the dark background was once a green curtain. What the Mauritshuis research of 2018 found in Vermeer's most famous painting.
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On 21 August 1911 the Mona Lisa disappeared from the Louvre. For more than two years the most famous empty space in Paris drew crowds, and the painting came back a global icon.
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Leonardo's mural in Milan is one of the most reproduced images in the world. These seven details, some documented and some disputed, show how much it still hides in plain sight.
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Everyone notices the stretched skull at the feet of Holbein's two ambassadors. Fewer notice the small crucifix half hidden behind the curtain, or what the objects on the shelves are telling us.
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Rembrandt's most famous painting shows a militia company in daylight, was cut down to fit a wall in 1715 and only got its name more than a century after it was painted.
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He tried art dealing, teaching and preaching before he picked up a brush. In the ten years that followed he made more than 850 paintings and sold only a handful.
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