Art and Architecture

• Ancient Chinese artists would never paint pictures of women’s feet.
  


• Leonardo DaVinci began painting the Mona Lisa in 1503. He was still working on the painting when he emigrated to France in 1516 and is believed to have finished it three years later, just before he died. The painting has remained in France ever since and is owned by the state. It once hung in Napoleon's bedroom.
  


• Pablo Picasso's career lasted seventy-eight years, from 1895 until his death in 1973.
  


• The Eiffel Tower is 984 feet high. It receives a fresh coat of 300 tons of reddish-green paint every seven years.
  


• The estimated weight of the Great Pyramid of Egypt is 6,648,000 tons.
  


• The extended right arm of the Statue of Liberty is 42 feet long.
  


• The Hoover Dam was built to last 2,000 years. The concrete in it will not even be fully cured for another 500 years.
  


• The largest movie theater in the world, Radio City Music Hall in New York City, opened in December, 1932. It originally had 5,945 seats.
  


• The largest stained-glass window in the world is at Kennedy International Airport in New York City. It can be seen on the American Airlines terminal building and measures 300 feet long by 23 feet high.
  


• The world's largest art gallery is the Winter Palace and Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia. Visitors would have to walk 15 miles to see the 322 galleries which house nearly 3 million works of art.
  


• X-ray technology has shown there are 3 different versions of the Mona Lisa under the visible one.