"Why is she smiling? I bet it's because of her size changing secret."
The world of art as portrayed in stories is often inaccurate. Since the needs of the story outweigh the need for accuracy and Tropes Are Tools, creators will often have their protagonist roll up a canvas Mona Lisa and carry it off in a tube, although Leonardo da Vinci painted it on a wood panel.
The creator may or may not be aware of the artistic license being taken. There may be easy ways around the Plot Hole addressed through the artistic license or it could be practically impossible to tell the creator's story without this break from reality. The artwork can be a painting, a poem, a song, a building, an invention, or any other piece that would be called art. It includes taking liberties with how the world of art works, such as speeding up the time it take to appraise a piece, or how museums acquire artwork. It also includes distorting facts about the world of art and artworks.
Contrast with Artistic License – History. This is not a trope about anachronisms. Should a piece of artwork not exist in the time period of the story, such as Buddy Holly playing a 1965 Fender Stratocaster in 1959, history is the problem, not the artwork. Should Buddy be playing a banjo rather than his Stratocaster, the artwork has changed and fits this trope.
Contrast with Hollywood Density. Should Michelangelo's David be picked up by a crane or person(!) that couldn't possibly lift 6 tons, but is still 17 feet tall and looks the same as in real life, that's Hollywood Density. If it's presented as a 6-foot-tall statue it fits this trope.
Can be averted through Fictional Painting. The artwork or process must be presented as Real Life in order for the artistic license to be taken.
Songs performed wrong, poems misquoted, paintings painted on the wrong material, buildings such as the Eiffel Tower or Taj Mahal misrepresented, and museums behind elaborate plots to steal all of Van Gogh's paintings are all possible examples of this trope. The key is that the story references a facet of the world of art as if it is authentic and the depiction is different from reality in a meaningful way.
A Sub-Trope of Artistic License, and a Super-Trope to Wrongfully Attributed. Related to Artistic License – Music.
Examples:
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Documentaries
- The Fabric Of The Cosmos: The Mona Lisa appears far larger than it actually is.
Films — Live-Action
- Black Swan:: Nina is chosen to play the lead role in the company's touring production of Swan Lake. In the world of ballet, because the lead roles are so strenuous and challenging, it's normal to have them shared by several dancers. A company would also be extremely unlikely to have just one principal dancer performing all the lead roles - most world-class companies would have around a dozen.
- The Da Vinci Code:
- Sophie puts a GPS tracker on a bar of soap from the Louvre and throws it out the window onto a passing truck. The bathrooms in that part of the Louvre have no windows and don't use bar soap.
- "Madonna of the Rocks" hangs in the Grand Gallery, not the Salle des Etats. The painting directly across from the "Mona Lisa" is Caliari's "The Wedding Feast at Cana". This painting is an enormous 32 feet (9.9 meters) wide. Even if "Virgin of the Rocks" did hang opposite the "Mona Lisa", it's 6 feet 6 inches (1.99 meters) tall, too tall for Sophie to see over. The painting's ornate wooden frame is also too heavy for an average person to lift unassisted.
- Dead Poets Society: Keating misquotes Walt Whitman's 1892 "Song of Myself". The word "rooftops" should have been "roofs".
- Equilibrium: In an early scene, the Grammaton Clerics capture and destroy a stash of contraband art, including the Mona Lisa. Their scanners even assure them it's the original Mona Lisa—but it's still much larger than its Real Life counterpart.
- Ever After: Leonardo da Vinci is shown pulling the Mona Lisa out of a tube and unrolling it so that onlookers can admire it. The Mona Lisa was painted on wood panel.
- Glass Onion: Miles Bron brags about being in possession of the original of The Mona Lisa; however, it is larger than in real life and is painted on canvas, while the real deal is painted on wood.
- Looney Tunes: Back in Action: The sequence at the Louvre Museum, in which Bugs Bunny and Daffy visit several iconic paintings to escape from Elmer Fudd, features paintings that aren't exposed there: The Persistence of Memory is on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, all of the public versions of The Scream are either at the Munch Museum or at the National Gallery of Norway, both in Oslo, and A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte is at the Art Institute of Chicago.
- The Thomas Crown Affair (1999): The Monet stolen by TC is credited as being the first painting in the Impressionist school - Monet's "Impression: Sunrise" of 1872. The painting shown in the movie is Monet's 1906 "San Giorgio Maggiore by Twilight".
- The Monuments Men: Stokes gives a lecture to Roosevelt and identifies a work by "Da Vinci", rather than Leonardo. This is a classic post-The Da Vinci Code mistake that no art historian — and certainly none living in the 1940s — would have made. The name of the artist was Leonardo and he was born in the town of Vinci — Leonardo Da Vinci means "Leonardo, of Vinci".
Literature
- Part of Mary's clumsiness in Bad News Ballet initially is that her ballet slippers are too big for her feet, since her mother hopes she'll grow into them. However, she wouldn't be allowed to dance at all in oversized slippers—ballet slippers, even for beginners, must be snug to the foot and well-fitted both to avoid tripping and to make sure the foot is holding positions properly. She would be expected to get correctly sized shoes by the dance teachers.
- In The Real Princess and the Snowy Autumn by Alexandra Yegorushkina, the plot kicks off on a day when everyone eerily decides to talk about rats. This includes multiple students choosing to recite God's Judgment on a Bishop, Vasily Zhukovsky's translation of Robert Southey's ballad of the same name. However, while in Southey's ballad (which is virtually unknown in Russia) the eponymous bishop is indeed eaten by rats, in Zhukovsky's version he is eaten by mice.
Live-Action TV
- Charmed (1998): In "Sight Unseen", when one is developing a photo, it's first put into a developer chemical, which shows the picture up, then a stop, which stops it from developing anymore, then a fix which "sets" the photo. But in the basement, Prue puts the exposed photo into a tray with chemicals in it, where it starts to develop, then into a second tray where it develops fully.
- Doctor Who: In "City of Death", the Mona Lisas (plural) are, as usual, much too big.
- The Doctor's occasional references to "Da Vinci" over the years (see above under The Monuments Men), alongside the expected "Leonardo", might be explained by the Doctor figuring that's who his less-erudite companions know him as—except "The Two Doctors" shows Six flipping through an accordion file of the calling cards of various famous acquaintances, which is sorted alphabetically. Leonardo is not only referred to as "Da Vinci", he's filed under "D".
- Possible subversion in "The Girl Who Waited", which appears to have the Mona Lisa in the Two Streams Hospital (with the Doctor explaining that "Apalapucians are great cultural scavengers, Rory. This gallery's a scrapbook of their favourite places") until Rory clocks a Handbot over the head with it and it tears like paper. But it actually makes sense that the "cultural scavengers" might be more likely to have a beautifully framed print of the Mona Lisa than the real thing.
- El internado Hieronymus Bosch' triptych Adoration of the Magi (a.k.a. The Epiphany) is shown to be painted on canvas rather than on wooden panel like it actually is.The three pieces are also shown to be a different shape and size than in real life as well as not having grisaille paintings on the other side the original triptych has.
- Medici: The Magnificent: Sandro Botticelli's painting Fortezza is somehow seen hanging in the dining hall of the Medici Palace in Part 1. The Medici family didn't commission the painting, statesman Tommaso Soderini did, for the Tribunale di Mercanzia of Florence.
- Midsomer Murders: In "Saints and Sinners", the portrait of Benedicta Milson is actually of Margaret Tudor, eldest daughter of Henry VII of England. To fit in with the story, the picture has been altered to include a treasure chest and a necklace around her neck. Her right arm has also been moved to rest on the chest. Originally both her arms were folded across her body, supporting a small monkey which is now partially floating in mid air.
- Sabrina the Teenage Witch: Zelda is seen reading Valley of the Dolls in the episode "Tick Tick Hilda's Clock", and saying "the things that go on in that valley". The valley in the title does not refer to a place and is metaphorical, referring to withdrawals from drugs, which is what the dolls are.
- Slings & Arrows: May references a Vincent van Gogh painting, The Plain of Auvers, calling it "haunting" and "disturbing" because the artist "painted it four days before he shot himself". There is no van Gogh with that title. There is one called Plain near Auvers, which was painted the same year as his death, but it was definitely not his last work and can't really be described as creepy. May could be referring to a number of other works, like Wheatfield with Crows, Wheatfield Under Thunderclouds, or most likely Landscape at Auvers in the Rain, all of which have been called "the last van Gogh". But their titles aren't as mysterious and ambiguous.
- Star Trek: The Next Generation: In "The Most Toys", Kivas Fajo, a collector of ancient rarities, displays the Mona Lisa in his treasure trove that is larger than the Mona Lisa actually is.
- The Twilight Zone (1959): In "The Purple Testament", Rod Serling says in his opening narration that he is quoting Shakespeare's play Richard III. His quotation is actually from Richard II, also written by William Shakespeare.
Video Games
- Oxygen Not Included: When a duplicant gets the Masterworks ability in art, the artistic works produced resemble masterpieces by Leonardo da Vinci or Frida Kahlo but featuring duplicants instead of humans.
- The Sims: The process of becoming a living legend artist includes wood whittling, house painting, comic book penciling, becoming a wedding photographer, and even becoming a museum guard. Those skills have little to nothing to do with what it takes to become a world-renowned artist.
Western Animation
- Ed, Edd n Eddy: The Eds interrupt Jimmy while he's painting, and he wails "my fresco is ruined!" when he's painting on a canvas. A fresco is a painting done to wet plaster on a wall.
- In the Madeline episode "Madeline at the Louvre", the Mona Lisa is depicted as an enormous painting, reaching almost from floor to ceiling: many times bigger than its actual size (pictured above).
- Played for Laughs in The Fairly Oddparents, where Crocker produces an "extended" version of The Scream that shows he's screaming because he got an F. Knowing Crocker, this might well have been a reproduction he personally doctored.
- In the Muppet Babies (2018) episode "You Ought to Be in Pictures'', the art gallery the Babies visit features a number of famous artworks, most of which are famously elsewhere, incuding the Mona Lisa. It's plausible they could have one of the many castings of Rodin's Thinker, though
- Sabrina: The Animated Series: one episode involving a trip to an art museum, which is local to Greendale, and The Scream is on display. As mentioned above, all editions of the painting are to be found in Norway.
