Painting Facts

When young and impoverished, Pablo Picasso kept warm by burning his own paintings.

Bob Ross painted roughly 30,000 works in his lifetime - nearly triple Picasso's output. For each of his 381 TV episodes, he painted three versions of the same scene: one before the camera, one on air, and one for his books. Today, 1,165 of those originals sit in cardboard boxes in a Virginia warehouse owned by Bob Ross Inc., which has never sold a single one. The Smithsonian holds four.

Luigi Lo Rosso, a junk dealer from Capri, found a rolled-up canvas in a villa cellar in 1962 and hung it in his family’s living room. His wife called it “horrible.” Experts now believe it may be a genuine Picasso - a portrait of Dora Maar created between 1930 and 1936 - and have valued it at up to €6 million.

A geologist named Ann Pizzorusso says she solved a 500-year mystery in the Mona Lisa. She matched the rocky landscape behind the subject to Lecco, Italy - the 14th-century Ponte Azzone Visconti bridge, the limestone Alps, and Lake Garlate. Leonardo worked in the Lecco region for years. Not every art historian agrees, but the geological case is hard to argue with.