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The Kiss

Born into poverty, Gustav Klimt’s father and brother died when Gustav was 30, leaving additional debt for him to assume.

The Kiss, opulently gilded and extravagantly patterned, is Gustav Klimt’s fin-de-siecle portrayal of intimacy. It is a mix of Symbolism and Vienna Jugendstil, the Austrian variant of Art Nouveau. Klimt depicts his subjects as mythical figures made modern by luxuriant surfaces of up-to-the-moment graphic motifs. The work is a high point of the artist’s Golden Phase between 1899 and 1910, when he often used gold leaf–a technique inspired by a 1903 trip to the Basilica di San Vitale in Ravenna, Italy, where he saw the church’s famed Byzantine mosaics.

The Starry Night

Plagued by psychiatric illness throughout his life, van Gogh died by suicide in 1890. Evidence suggests that he had manic depression, a chronic mental illness that affects many creative people.

Vincent van Gogh’s most popular painting, The Starry Night, was created by van Gogh at the asylum in Saint-Remy, where he’d committed himself in 1889. Indeed, The Starry Night seems to reflect his turbulent state of mind at the time, as the night sky comes alive with swirls and orbs of frenetically applied brush strokes springing from the yin and yang of his personal demons and awe of nature.

Hand with Reflecting Sphere

MC Escher’s talent was shown through the incredible work he put in. He made 448 lithographs, woodcuts and wood engravings and more than 2000 drawings and sketches.

“Hand with Reflecting Sphere” is actually a self portrait, in which he has drawn his own hand holding a reflective sphere. The reflective sphere is capturing Escher in his studio. The image appears to be that of a left hand holding a spherical mirror. The hand and arm belong to Escher himself who is at the center of a room. The exact center of the sphere is the exact center point between his eyes so that no matter which way the print is rotated that point is always the center focal point. Escher was fascinated by the concept of a mirror reality in his art mixing the actual objects of one reality with the reflected reality. “Hand with Reflecting Sphere” may be one of Escher’s most recognizable prints.

Girl with a Pearl Earring

1672 was so difficult for Vermeer as well as the entire Dutch Republic. It led to a downturn in the art market. He borrowed large amounts of money and was even caught embezzling money from his mother-in-law.

However, Vermeer’s 1665 study of a young woman is startlingly real and startlingly modern, almost as if it were a photograph. This gets into the debate over whether or not Vermeer employed a pre-photographic device called a camera obscura to create the image. Leaving that aside, the sitter is unknown, though it has been speculated that she might have been Vermeer’s maid. He portrays her looking over her shoulder, locking eyes with the viewer as if attempting to establish an intimate connection across the centuries.

Technically speaking, Girl isn’t a portrait, but rather an example of the Dutch genre called a tronie–a headshot meant more as a still life of facial features than as an attempt to capture a likeness.

Mona Lisa

Although it’s clear that da Vinci struggled with ADHD, a common trait for entrepreneurs, he managed to pursue his life without worrying about it.

Painted between 1503 and 1517, da Vinci’s alluring portrait has been dogged by two questions since the day it was made: Who is the subject, and why is she smiling? A number of theories for the former have been proffered over the years: That she’d the wife of the Florentine merchant Francesco do Barolomeo del Giocondo (ergo, the work’s alternative title La Gioconda); that she’s Leonardo’s mother, Caterina, conjured from Leonardo’s boyhood memories of her, and finally, that it’s a self-portrait in drag. As for that famous smilek its enigmatic quality has driven people crazy for centuries. Whatever the reason, Mona Lisa’s look of preternatural calm comports with the idealized landscape behind her, which dissolves into the distance through Leonardo’s use of atmospheric perspective.

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