#renaissance

The odd name comes from the Cowper family, who used to own it — nothing to do with the subject. Like a lot of British collections, it eventually made its way into an American museum in the early 1900s.

For a long time this was just filed as 'Portrait of a Man' — someone eventually managed to make out the barely-legible letter he's holding, addressed to himself, and that's apparently how they worked out who he was.

Apparently this was painted after he was already dead — he was stabbed at Mass in 1478 as part of a plot against his family, and pictures like this got made afterward so people had something to remember him by.

Apparently X-rays show he first painted the two of them sitting upright and stiff, almost like a formal icon, before loosening it into this warmer, cuddled-up pose.

They say experts spent decades arguing over who even painted this — one called it Giorgione, another said Palma il Vecchio — before most eventually came round to the name on the card now.

Apparently this is one of his earliest known paintings — from back when he was still learning from a couple of older Venetian painters.

This one has had an odd trip: it belonged to the Russian imperial collection at one point, and the Soviet government sold it off in the 1930s to raise cash — that's apparently how it ended up in Washington.

This one got mistaken for a Raphael self-portrait for a long time. Turns out it's actually a portrait of one of his patrons — a wealthy Florentine banker who helped fund some of his other work.

This one's grouped with two other Dürer engravings as his 'Master Prints,' from what I've read — three prints meant to show off everything the medium could do.

Legend has it Saint Jerome asked for one last communion right before he died in his cell — it's not actually in the Bible, from what I can tell, just a story that stuck around for centuries.

The candles in this one apparently weren't just decorative — real ones were meant to burn in front of it, so the painted flames would blur together with the real light in a dim room.

This is one of several studies Michelangelo made while working out the Libyan Sibyl for the Sistine Chapel ceiling — the same sheet has more sketches on the back, including a small seated figure that never made it into the fresco. Apparently he drew from a male studio model even though the finished sibyl reads as a woman, which is why the anatomy here looks so unmistakably male.

The juniper behind her is supposedly a pun — 'ginepro' is Italian for juniper, so it doubles as a nod to her name. It's also, they say, the only Leonardo painting on public display anywhere in the Americas, part of why it made headlines when a museum bought it for a record sum in the 1960s.