Painting questions

“Camera” means “chamber” and “room” in Latin. Camera obscura was an optical device used in drawing, and an ancestor of modern photography. This is a source of the modern word camera.

Boy with a Basket of Fruit, c.1593, is a painting generally ascribed to Italian Baroque master Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, currently in the Galleria Borghese, Rome. The painting dates from the time when Caravaggio, newly arrived in Rome from his native Milan, was making his way in the competitive Roman art world. The model was his friend and companion, the Sicilian painter Mario Minniti, at about 16 years old.

Beautiful still life with peaches, pears and vases. This is a very elegant and the same time bright composition has amazing combination of colors, light, shadow and reflection on the wall. Paul Cezanne (1839-1906) was a French artist and Post-Impressionist painter whose work laid the foundations of the transition from the 19th century conception of artistic endeavour to a new and radically different world of art in the 20th century.

Arnold Böcklin (1827-1901) was a Swiss symbolist painter. Böcklin exercised an influence on Giorgio de Chirico and on Surrealist painters like Max Ernst and Salvador Dalí. When asked who was his favorite painter, Marcel Duchamp controversially named Arnold Böcklin as having a major influence on his art. Whether Duchamp was serious in this assertion is still debated.

Mona Lisa is famous for an optical illusion aka 'the mysterious smile'. The illusion is caused due to peripheral vision as the focus of the viewer shifts from the eyes of the portrait to the lips of the portrait.

The Milkmaid of Bordeaux is an oil-on-canvas painting completed between 1825 and 1827, generally attributed to the Spanish artist Francisco Goya (1746–1828). Although the picture is held in great esteem and widely admired by critics and the public, doubt has been cast by art historians as to whether it is an actual Goya.

Tomyris was a Massagetean ruler who reigned over the Massagetae, an Iranian people from Scythian pastoral-nomadic confederation of Central Asia east of the Caspian Sea. Tomyris led her armies to defend against an attack by Cyrus the Great of the Achaemenid Empire, and, according to Herodotus, defeated and killed him in 530 BC. The names of Tomyris, and her son Spargapises, who was the head of her army, are of Iranian origins.

Degenerate art was a term adopted in the 1920s by the Nazi Party in Germany to describe modern art. During the dictatorship of Adolf Hitler, German modernist art was removed from state owned museums and banned in Nazi Germany on the grounds that such art was an "insult to German feeling", un-German, Jewish, or Communist in nature. Those identified as degenerate artists were subjected to sanctions being forbidden to exhibit or to sell their art.

"Ad" Reinhardt (1913 -1967) was an abstract painter active in New York. Reinhardt is best known for his so-called "black" paintings of the 1960s, which appear at first glance to be simply canvases painted black but are actually composed of black and nearly black shades. Among many other suggestions, these paintings ask if there can be such a thing as an absolute, even in black, which some viewers may not consider a color at all.

Dogs Playing Poker, by Cassius Marcellus Coolidge, refers collectively to an 1894 painting, a 1903 series of sixteen oil paintings commissioned by Brown & Bigelow to advertise cigars, and a 1910 painting. All eighteen paintings in the overall series feature anthropomorphized dogs, but the eleven in which dogs are seated around a card table have become well known in the United States as examples of kitsch art in home decoration.