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  • Rotating Quiz #77: a late comment

    From Mark Brader@21:1/5 to Stephen Perry on Fri Nov 3 00:15:09 2023
    In 2012, in Rotating Quiz #77, Stephen Perry asked:

    | 9. the 'Mona Lisa' is the most famous painting of all time.
    | what's the 2nd most famous one?

    His expected answer was "The Starry Night" (Van Gogh), but when
    this was challenged, it turned out he had based this answer
    on a top-10 list from "a random source on the internet that
    agreed with what I recall from my high school humanities class".

    Stephen invited conflicting evidence and, in response, I said:

    The obvious start was a Google phrase search on

    "second most famous painting"

    On the first 2 pages of 10 hits each, there were 7 that said it was
    "The Scream" (Munch), but that'll be exaggerated because it's been in
    the news recently and all the pages are reports of the same news story
    or refer to it...

    Of the other 13 hits, 8 did not answer the question because they
    were about qualified favorites (like "da Vinci's second most famous")
    or were debates or queries on the subject.

    And the 5 remaining hits named 5 different painting as the
    second most famous:
    * The Sistine Chapel ceiling (Michelangelo)...
    * "The Starry Night" (Van Gogh)...
    * "The Last Supper" (Leonardo da Vinci)...
    * "Girl with a Pearl Earring" (Vermeer)...
    * "The Persistence of Memory" (Dali)...

    I went on to check Google hit counts on the individual paintings,
    and then proposed that

    ...that at least "The Last Supper", the Sistine Chapel
    ceiling, and "The Scream" (listed alphabetically by artist) should
    be accepted, and probably also "American Gothic"...

    which Stephen agreed to do.


    Looking back at my old posting now, it occurred to me to try the
    search

    "second most famous painting"

    again, and see what it indicated now that "The Scream" was no longer
    in the news. Well, Google's practice now is to interrupt its list
    of top hits with a list of "people also ask" pages, and I decided
    to check those as well as the top 20 actual hits. As before,
    I ignored qualified claims such as "da Vinci's second most famous".

    And the result this time there was a clear consensus on "The Last
    Supper" (Leonardo da Vinci), with 6 votes:

    http://www.easy-oil-painting-techniques.org/leonardo-da-vinci-paintings.html
    http://aleteia.org/2019/11/22/leonardos-the-last-supper-is-the-second-most-famous-painting-in-the-world/
    http://www.pinterest.ca/pin/paintings--527132331365826778/
    http://rosbena.com/list/ten-most-famous-paintings-in-the-world/
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SugOkY3vxIM
    http://twitter.com/jerrysaltz/status/1282728552954236928

    4 other paintings received one vote each. In alphabetical order
    by artist, they were:

    * "The Birth of Venus" (Botticelli) according to
    http://artistro.com/blogs/news/30-most-famous-artworks-in-history-the-greatest-art-of-all-time
    * Sistine Chapel ceiling (Michelangelo) according to
    http://artsandculture.google.com/story/6-of-the-world-39-s-most-visited-paintings/sAVhFizZbAwNJA?hl=en
    * "The Scream (Munch) according to
    http://www.forbes.com/sites/jonathonkeats/2016/03/18/seen-the-scream-this-new-york-exhibit-provides-a-fresh-perspective-on-the-great-edvard-munch/
    * "Starry Night" (Van Gogh) according to
    http://top-10-list.org/2011/08/01/top-10-most-famous-paintings/


    So now we know.
    --
    Mark Brader, Toronto "Remember that computers are very,
    msb@vex.net very fast..." -- Steve Summit

    My text in this article is in the public domain.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
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