Today’s Tough trivia question in the Arts category: It seems our most famous artists are either mononymous or pseudonymous, but before they were artists, they were children who were given full names by their parents. How many of these noms d’art can you fill out as they would have appeared on their birth certificates (if birth certificates had been a thing when and where they were born): Donatello, Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, El Greco, Rembrandt, Hokusai, Hiroshige, Grandma Moses, Toulouse-Lautrec, Erté, Christo, Jeanne-Claude?

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Yesterday’s question was:

Lanes, roads, streets, avenues, boulevards, turnpikes, highways: the American road system is one of the iconic representations of the country. But it wasn’t always so; they were a creation of the automobile, which itself is barely more than a century old. Before the coming of our modern interstate highway system (about which there will be a question in the future), the two most famous roadways were the Lincoln Highway and Route 66. The Lincoln Highway was conceived in 1912, and formally dedicated on October 31, 1913. Route 66—also known as the Will Rogers Highway—was one of the original highways in the US Highway System. It was established on November 11, 1926, with road signs erected in 1927. Which states were crossed by the Lincoln Highway, and which by Route 66? (Bonus points if you know which states hosted both highways.) Further bonus if you know which of the two was longer (and can guess how many miles they covered).

The answer is:

At the time, it was a grand achievement in connecting the United States, but the Lincoln Highway had room for improvement. Riding in an Army convoy on the Lincoln Highway in 1915 convinced Dwight Eisenhower, when he was president four decades later, that the Interstate Highway System was a necessity. The Lincoln Highway ran from coast to coast, from Times Square in New York City to Lincoln Park in San Francisco. It originally ran through New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, and California, covering 3,389 miles. In 1915, the “Colorado Loop” was removed, and in 1928, a realignment shifted the highway to pass through northern West Virginia as well. By 1924, it had been improved, realigned, and shortened to 3,142 miles. In 1928,

Route 66 has been known as the Main Street of America and the Mother Road. It was memorialized in song, such as “(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66” by Bobby Troup, and the CBS television series Route 66 (which aired from 1960 to 1964), though it has largely been bypassed by the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System. Route 66 originally ran from Chicago, Illinois, to Santa Monica, California. It covered 2,448 miles, and passed through Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California.

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Ian’s Tough Trivia is a daily feature of this blog (Monday’s category is History; Tuesday is Arts; Wednesday is Science; Thursday is Entertainment; and Friday is Grab Bag). Each day, I post a tough question, as well as the answer to the previous day’s question. Simply comment on this post with your answer. I’ll approve the comments after the next question is posted. Sure, you can probably find the answers by searching the web, but what’s the fun in that?

And if you’ve got a favorite trivia question—or even just a topic for which you’d like to see a question—let me know! Reader participation is warmly encouraged.