Portal:Visual arts/Did you know/Archive/4

31 March 2007

 * ...that the Fenari Isa Mosque (pictured) in Istanbul represents one of the first examples of edifices with a quincuncial plan in Byzantine architecture?
 * ...that according to the controversial Hockney-Falco thesis, the rise of realism in Renaissance art, such as Jan Van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait, was largely due to the use of curved mirrors and other optical aids?
 * ...that the 1957 film La Anam in 1996 was selected as one of the best Egyptian films in history by the Egyptian Film association?
 * ...that Danish painter Carl-Henning Pedersen was known as the "Scandinavian Chagall"?
 * ...that Fyodor Schechtel, the architect of Yaroslavsky Rail Terminal in Moscow, Russia, was expelled from his classes at Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in 1878 for "bad attendance"?