This page explains twenty famous paintings, from Guernica to Las Meninas, and gives each one the single detail that most changes how it is read: a title the painter never chose, a fact he bent, a figure placed where nobody looks. Every entry ends with a link to the full story on Cool Stories About Art.
The twenty are grouped by what they have in common rather than by date. Some are not what their popular description says, some turn a real event into an argument, some are crowded pictures with a right way to read them, and some are built around something the viewer is not shown. Rankings by looks and by fame are separate lists, and the links to them sit at the end.
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Even the names on this list can mislead. Whistler's Mother is a nickname. The title Whistler gave the canvas is Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 1, and in 1878 he wrote that the public had no reason to care about the sitter's identity. For him the subject was the arrangement of tones, and the woman in the chair was the occasion for it.
Las Meninas has been renamed more often still. In the inventory of the royal Alcázar in Madrid in 1666 it appears as a portrait of the empress with her ladies and a dwarf. After the fire that destroyed the Alcázar in 1734 it became The Family of Philip IV, and the name used today first appeared in a Prado catalogue in 1843, almost two centuries after Velázquez painted it.
A label added later is a small thing, yet it shows how the accepted reading of a picture is often assembled by people who came after the painter. Each of the twenty paintings below has a place where the familiar reading gives way, and each entry points to it.
What You'll Discover
What Munch actually wrote about his Scream.
What Turner changed about his old warship.
What order Primavera is read in.
Who stands in the mirror of Las Meninas.