Arts and Letters

by Dave Shukan

ANSWER: THE BACCHANTE

 

There are 15 images from famous paintings and one image that is a 4x4 collage of square snippets taken from those images (and from the collage itself). The artists and titles appear in the file names, which should have precluded any needless searching for them (they are not needed).

Find the locations of the snippets in their original paintings. Then, for each of those, look at the very same portion of the painting in the position (in the large grid) that corresponds to the position in the small grid. For example: the upper-left square in the montage is from a particular spot within the Klee painting -- now take precisely the same portion of the upper-left painting in the big grid, which is the Magritte painting. Since the Klee snippet was rotated 180 degrees, consider this new square from Magritte to have been rotated 180 degrees as well. When you orient it "right side up", it looks like an L. (The process described here is hinted by the flavortext note that when Verne "found something he liked in one work, he would try looking at another work the same way".)

The snippets (yellow) and their corresponding locations that form letters are:


The black and white Durer work contains a magic square with numbers 1-16, which provides the ordering for these letters.


Ordering them in this fashion gives CASSATT CYMBAL GAL, which identifies the famous painting THE BACCHANTE.