Famous Paintings And Their Stories

Many famous works of art have the ability to capture our attention, create an emotional response and influence popular culture. Through revolutionary techniques, innovative compositions and personal expression, artists such as Leonardo da Vinci, Vincent van Gogh and Salvador Dali have been able to tell a compelling story that transcends both time and culture.

The Mona Lisa

The Mona Lisa or ‘La Gioconda’ as the Italians prefer to call it, was painted by Leonardo da Vinci between 1503 and 1519. Scholars believe that the painting is a portrait of Lisa del Giocondo, the wife of Florentine cloth merchant Francesco del Giocondo who commissioned the work.

Leonardo employed a revolutionary technique on the painting known as sfumato, meaning “vanished or evaporated”. This technique involved the blending of light and dark tones to create a softness that created a seamless and lifelike image. It was this technique that helped create the famously mysterious Mona Lisa gaze.

The Mona Lisa has seen a colourful past; it has previously hung from Napoleon Bonaparte’s bedchamber and was also stolen from the Louvre in Paris in 1911, by Italian glazier Vincenzo Perrugia, before being returned two years later. Today, the Mona Lisa resides again in the Louvre and although just 30 x 21 inches in size, it commands vast crowds who are each permitted just 30 seconds to view it.

The Starry Night

The Starry Night is an expressive work of art that was painted by the Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh in 1889. Vincent was troubled by mental health issues and carried out the painting during a difficult period of his life, while he was self-admitted for twelve months at Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum.

The image shows his view of the village of Saint-Rémy from his bedroom window, but as painting was not permitted in this area of the asylum, he completed the picture at a later stage, completely from memory.

It is thought the night sky shows Vincent’s inner turmoil and longing for the calmness of the serene village below. Vincent employed contrasting colour transitions while combining light and dark elements to create an energetic and dynamic masterpiece that gained worldwide recognition after his death in 1890.

The Persistence of Memory

The Persistence of Memory was painted by the Spanish artist Salvador Dali in 1931, who drew inspiration from the seashore at Cape Creus, Catalonia and Sigmund Freud’s teachings of psychoanalysis. Dali employed a technique known as surrealism, an art style that emerged in Paris in the late 1910s. Surrealism takes inspiration from an artist’s dreams, subconsciousness and innermost thoughts.

Dali’s ‘paranoiac critical method’ of painting involved incorporating highly detailed and dreamlike imagery, bringing together unrelated objects in a surreal manner. The meaning of the piece is open to interpretation, with many artists agreeing that its melting clocks signify timelessness and its barren landscape and ants depicting isolation and decay. The Persistence of Memory can be seen in The Museum of Modern Art in New York and remains one of Dali’s most prominent works of art.