The “Charging Bull” statue was made by sculptor Arturo Di Modica. He paid the product cost of $350,000 out of his own pocket. The statue weighs 7,000 pounds (3,175 kg). It was placed on a city street in 1987, without city permits, but was eventually moved to the Financial District.

The Statue of Liberty is the largest hammered copper statue in the world.

Picasso could draw before he could walk and his first word was the Spanish word for “pencil”.

Vincent van Gogh sold only painting in his entire life – “The Red Vineyard”. It was sold for 400 francs (equal to about $2,000 today) to Belgian painter and collector Anna Boch.

When the “Mona Lisa” was stolen from the Louvre in 1912, six “replicas” were sold as the original, each at a huge price, in the three years before the original was recovered.

In 1961, Matisse’s “Le Bateau” (“The Boat”) hung upside-down for two months in the Museum of Modern Art, New York. None of the 116,000 visitors even noticed!

In 1565, the first pencil was invented in England.

Michelangelo painted the fresco ceiling of the Sistine Chapel standing up. The artist built a series of scaffolds he designed to attach to the chapel walls with brackets, so he could be close enough to the ceiling to reach above his head to work and paint.

The small town depicted in Van Gogh’s “The Starry Night” is Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in the south of France. Vincent painted the work while he was a patient at a psychiatric hospital there. Presently, the hospital has a wing named after the painter.

Andy Brown, an English artist, stitched together 1000 used tea bags, to create a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II.

Pablo Picasso was an animal lover. He owned a pet monkey, a goat, an owl, a turtle and packs of dogs and cats.

Leonardo da Vinci was a vegetarian and also fought for animal rights. He bought caged birds and then set them free.

Roman Statues were made with detachable heads. One head could be taken off and replaced by yet another one.

Art used to be an Olympic event! Between 1912 and 1948 medals were given out for architecture, music, painting, sculpture and literature. The 1928 Olympic Stadium, designed by Jan Wils, won the gold medal in architecture at the 1928 Olympics.

The “Mona Lisa” has her own mailbox in the Louvre. Over the years, she’s received love letters, flowers, and poems. But artist Luc Maspero took this fervor too far. In 1852 he dove off a hotel balcony after saying, “For years I have grappled desperately with her smile. I prefer to die.”

The color wheel predates the United States! Sir Isaac Newton invented it in 1706 by refracting white sunlight into its six colors. The realization that light alone is responsible for color was radical. The wheel proved especially useful for artists, who could now easily observe the most effective color complementation.

Artist Willard Wigan once inhaled his own work! Dr. Wigan’s works are ‘micro-sculptures’, so tiny they must be viewed through a microscope. In creating his art, Wigan has to slow his heartbeat and work between pulses. The work he inhaled was Alice, from ”Alice in Wonderland”. But apparently she was even better when remade.

In 2003 street artist Banksy stuck his own work to the wall in the Tate Modern. The prank was soon undone by its inadequate glue. But for a few hours, “Crimewatch UK Has Ruined the Countryside For All of Us” was hung in one of the world’s most famous museums.