Today I received this e-mail challenging me to see how many names of famous persons I could manage to remember from the picture above. This was clearly a case of 'Art meets Knowledge.' It's one of those things that makes you stop and admire the endless creativity of people in all walks of life. Someone on the Web combined the image with links to the Wikipedia entries for each person he can identify. In only a glance you get the concept and think, "Imagine the conversations at that house party."
This e-mail stated that if you know 25 persons then you're really well educated. I really got into this game and drew a list of 35 persons. But I was grossly disappointed not to find the answers written beneath in the same e-mail. So I started my research until I got to some interesting information about this picture. In 2006, Chinese painters Dai Dudu, Li Tiezi, and Zhang An created an oil on canvas work incorporating many of history's most interesting and influential people entitled 'Discussing the Divine Comedy with Dante.' The last three additional faces belong to the artists themselves. According to Dai at the time, they wanted to represent world history within a single painting. They wanted to showcase the world’s story, and let viewers feel as if they were flipping the pages of a history book.
You can see the entire painting here, nicely tagged with tooltips (if you hover over a face) and with links to the appropriate wiki page (if you click on the face). When you visit the site, be sure to scroll your browser window all the way to the right, as the painting is quite wide. (P.S Don't forget to hover on the animals too - some of them have got a name too!). Enjoy!
