Trivial History Trivia

Hey Wolverines, welcome back to a new semester. To hopefully inspire you to take an art history class, here are some of my favorite interesting facts from history that make those classes so enjoyable:

In Soviet prisons, it was once common to tattoo portraits of Lenin and Stalin over an inmate’s vital organs, in the hope that guards would not harm them in those areas out of respect for the two Communist leaders.

A lot of people associate Marie Antoinette with her iconic enormous hair. She famously filled it with various event-appropriate objects. Reportedly, she had a (what one can only assume was horrific) birth scene placed in it when her sister-in-law delivered her first child. She was fond of filling it with fresh fruit and vegetables from her garden, with suck up aristocrat women following suit. The highest measurement we have

for one of these hair styles is 6 ft, Marie would have to crouch down in her carriage to accommodate it. There are actually 3 reported deaths of court ladies whose hair was so high that it caught on a chandelier and they were in effect hanged. These hair pieces were made from wire, horse hair, cotton pads, fake hair, and the wearer’s own hair.

Louis XI of France, appropriately nicknamed the Star King, was a paranoid despot who very much believed in astrology. He was so unnerved by his astrologer’s accurate prediction of a court lady’s death that he ordered for the astrologer to be defenestrated (yeah, THAT word) from a top window of the palace. However, right before the astrologer was about to be told of his impending death, the king asked him to predict his (the astrologer’s) own death and when it would occur. The astrologer replied “I shall die just three days before Your Majesty.” Louis XI was so bothered by this that he canceled the defenestration (look it up, that word is a history fact on its own).

Napoleon wore a black handkerchief around his neck for every battle except for one, where his black handkerchief was accidentally thrown in the wash and he was forced to wear a white silk cravat. That battle was Waterloo.

Picasso’s first word was the Spanish word for ‘pencil.’