Portal:Visual arts/Did you know/Archive/4

...that the Fenari Isa Mosque (pictured) in Istanbul represents one of the first examples of edifices with a quincuncial plan in Byzantine architecture?
...that according to the controversial Hockney-Falco thesis, the rise of realism in Renaissance art, such as Jan Van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait, was largely due to the use of curved mirrors and other optical aids?
...that the 1957 film La Anam in 1996 was selected as one of the best Egyptian films in history by the Egyptian Film association?
...that Danish painter Carl-Henning Pedersen was known as the "Scandinavian Chagall"?
...that Fyodor Schechtel, the architect of Yaroslavsky Rail Terminal in Moscow, Russia, was expelled from his classes at Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in 1878 for "bad attendance"?