mental floss presents Condensed Knowledge: A Deliciously Irreverent Guide to Feeling Smart Again – Bite-Sized Trivia and Mind-Blowing Facts - Softcover

Editors Of Mental Floss

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0060568062 ISBN 13: 9780060568061

Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks, 2004

Synopsis

Loaded with meaty trivia and tasty, bite-sized facts!

mental_floss is proud to offer a delicious, hearty helping of brain-food that's sure to fire up your neurons and tantalize your synapses. Condensed Knowledge is a mouthwatering mix of intriguing facts, lucid explanations, and mind-blowing theories that will satisfy even the hungriest mind!

Ingredients include:

5 tiny nations that get no respect • 4 civilizations nobody remembers • 5 classics written under the influence • 4 things your boss has in common with slime mold • 3 schools of thought that will impress the opposite sex • 4 things Einstein got wrong • 5 classical tunes you know from the movies • 3 famous studies that would be illegal today • 2 religious mysteries solved by chemistry • 5 scandals that rocked art, and much more ...

About this title

About the Author

Will Pearson and Mangesh Hattikudur met as first year students at Duke University. Ignoring the lures of law school and investment banking, the pair co-founded mental_floss and have been grinning ever since. Maggie Koerth-Baker is a freelance journalist and a former assistant editor at mental_floss magazine, where she consistently astounded Will and Mangesh with her amazingness.

From the Back Cover

Loaded with meaty trivia and tasty, bite-sized facts!

mental_floss is proud to offer a delicious, hearty helping of brain-food that's sure to fire up your neurons and tantalize your synapses. Condensed Knowledge is a mouthwatering mix of intriguing facts, lucid explanations, and mind-blowing theories that will satisfy even the hungriest mind!

Ingredients include:

5 tiny nations that get no respect • 4 civilizations nobody remembers • 5 classics written under the influence • 4 things your boss has in common with slime mold • 3 schools of thought that will impress the opposite sex • 4 things Einstein got wrong • 5 classical tunes you know from the movies • 3 famous studies that would be illegal today • 2 religious mysteries solved by chemistry • 5 scandals that rocked art, and much more ...

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Mental Floss Presents Condensed Knowledge

By Pearson, William

HarperResource

ISBN: 0060568062

Chapter One

5 Scandals That Rocked Art

Forgeries, thefts, and outright vandalism? That's right. Art history's about to get a whole lot more interesting.

_01:: The Vermeer Forgeries
Every age sees art through its own eyes, andthe cleverest forgers play up to this. One ofthe most notorious forgeries ever occurred inthe 1930s. A Dutchman named Han vanMeegeren (1889?1947) produced forgeries ofearly works by the Dutch 17th-century masterJan Vermeer. They were technically brilliantand faultless, using old canvas and thecorrect 17th-century pigments. Cunningly,van Meegeren chose religious imagery thatsome experts believed Vermeer had painted,but very few examples of which existed. Most(though not all) of the greatest experts werecompletely taken in, but when you see thepaintings now, you'll wonder why. All thefaces look like the great film stars of the 1930s,such as Marlene Dietrich and Douglas Fairbanks.

_02:: The Mona Lisa Theft
It's sometimes suggested that rich criminalsarrange for famous works of art to be stolen sothat they can have them exclusively to themselvesin private. Such theories have neverbeen proven, and the truth is usually just a bitsimpler. One of the most bizarre thefts was ofthe Mona Lisa from the Louvre in 1911. AnItalian workman, Vincenzo Perugia, walkedinto the gallery, took the painting off the wall,and carried it out. Security was nonexistent.

About two years later it was discovered in atrunk in his cheap lodging rooms in Florence.So, why did he take it? It was nothing to dowith money. He said that as the painting wasby an Italian, Leonardo da Vinci, it was part ofItaly's national cultural heritage, and he wassimply taking it back to where it belonged:Florence. (The painting was returned to theLouvre.)

_03:: The Auction Houses Scandal
The major commercial scandal of recent yearshas been the alleged collusion between thetwo big international auction houses Christie'sand Sotheby's. As the supply of expensivemasterpieces began to run out, competitionbetween the two firms became increasinglyfierce and each of them found it difficult tomake a profit. They got together secretly to fixnot the price of works of art themselves butthe commission that they would each chargeto sellers. In certain parts of the world, suchan arrangement is quite legal but not in theUnited States. Eventually the practice came tolight. The federal authorities imposed finesrunning into hundreds of millions of dollars,and prison sentences were also handed out.

_04:: The Portland Vase
Wanton acts of destruction in the art worldare fortunately rare. One of the strangest occurred in 1845 in the British Museum, London,and is worthy of a Sherlock Holmesstory. The Portland Vase, the most famous exampleof ancient Roman glass, decorated indark-blue-and-white cameo technique, wasbrought from Italy in 1783 and purchased bythe Duchess of Portland. A drunken youngman entered the museum and without explanationsmashed the vase and its glass displaycase. He was imprisoned for breaking the casebut not the vase, as British law didn't imposepenalties for destroying works of art of highvalue. The vase has since been repaired; however,you can still see the bruises.

_05:: Cellini's Saltcellar
A recent art world disaster/scandal occurredon May 13, 2003 (and it wasn't even a Friday!).Thieves climbed scaffolding andsmashed windows to enter Vienna's Art HistoryMuseum and stole the "Mona Lisa ofsculptures" -- Cellini's Saltcellar. This intricate16-centimeter-high sculpture was commissionedby François I, king of France, fromBenvenuto Cellini (1500?1571), the Renaissance'smost ingenious and gifted goldsmith.Crafted with amazingly rich detail and skill,its principal figures are a naked sea god and awoman who sit opposite each other, with legsentwined -- a symbolic representation of theplanet earth. The thieves set off the alarms, but these were ignored as false, and the theftremained undiscovered until 8:20 A.M. Thereasons for the theft are as yet unknown. Thefear is that these thieves will destroy the sculptureor melt it down, an act of vandalism thatwould be the equivalent of burning theMona Lisa.

Continues...

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Edition details

• Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0060568062
• ISBN 13: 9780060568061
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352