Art Expert Proves Picture's Worth Just 923 Words

Naples, Italy - For centuries, the old axiom, "A picture's worth a thousand words," has been unquestioningly accepted as the truth. "People felt that the typical painting was so filled with imagery, symbolism, history, and meaning that it would take 1,000 words to describe what was going on," explained Luigi Donatello, 61, curator of the The Pio Monte della Misericordia Art Gallery, and widely considered to be the world's foremost art expert, "But I had my doubts, so I decided to test the theory."

Over a five year period, Donatello recruited thousands of art-loving volunteers. He asked them to study five different important paintings and write down all their thoughts and feelings about each one. The paintings were: Da Vinci's "Mona Lisa," Van Gogh's "Starry Night," Whistler's "Arrangement in Grey and Black: Portrait of the Painter's Mother," Renoir's "Le Bal au Moulin de la Galette," and El Greco's "The Burial of Count Orgaz."

Donatello collected the descriptions and counted the number of words used in each. He then averaged all the word totals together. "The average was 923 words," stated Donatello. "And interestingly, each of the give years individually also totaled to that average number of 923." Donatello is now convinced that a picture is worth just 923 words. "I guess you could round it off if you wanted to be lazy, but if you truly want to be accurate, 923 words would be the exact number that a picture is worth."

In a related story, song historian Peter Jonquist is researching whether singer Al Jolson would actually have been willing to "walk a million miles for one of your smiles." Said Jonquist, "My suspicion is that the number will turn out to be substantially lower."