I love art, and though Renaissance art isn’t my favorite, I always find myself utterly and completely floored by its level of complexity. It’s so complex, and there are lots of hidden Easter eggs that we’re still finding! So here are hidden details in famous works of art from the Renaissance and beyond!
1.
In The Arnolfini Portrait by Jan van Eyck, the mirror on the wall shows two additional people in the portrait, presumably standing behind the artist.
2.
In 2014, scientists found a hidden portrait behind The Blue Room by Pablo Picasso. Art historians don’t know who the portrait is of, but it wasn’t uncommon for Picasso to reuse canvasses.
3.
In The Creation of Adam by Michelangelo, God is actually in a giant brain.
4.
In Death and Ascension of St. Francis by Giotto, you can see the devil hiding in the clouds.
5.
The painting Netherlandish Proverbs by Pieter Bruegel is just that. Several proverbs can be seen sneakily illustrated in this painting, like “armed to the teeth,” “the whole world in your hand,” and “there’s always bigger fish.”
6.
In the Mona Lisa, the letters “LV” can be seen in her eye if you look under a microscope.
You can kind of see it in this close-up of her pupil.
7.
Raphael hid himself in The School of Athens.
8.
At the top of The Scream, written in pencil, is the sentence “Can only have been painted by a madman” in Norwegian. Historians believe this is Munch’s handwriting, which was added to the painting by the artist after his first, heavily criticized exhibit.
9.
In Fishing for Souls by Adriaen van de Venne, a fly was painted like it landed on the canvas.
10.
John Dee was an occultist and alchemist who acted as an advisor to Queen Elizabeth. After x-raying this painting of him doing an experiment by Henry Gillard Glindoni, the National Gallery of London found a hidden circle of skulls in the background.
11.
Recently, a self-portrait of Caravaggio was found hidden in the wine cask in Bacchus.
12.
In Pieter Bruegel’s The Magpie and the Gallows, someone is pooping in the bottom left-hand corner.
13.
Some people think there are music notes hidden in The Last Supper by da Vinci.
Apparently, this can be uncovered by the hands and bread rolls in the painting. It sounds like this.
14.
Some scholars believe van Gogh’s Café Terrace at Night is actually a version of The Last Supper, with the waiter coincidentally adorned in white acting as Jesus, surrounded by 12 patrons, one of which is hiding from the rest. Additionally, the window directly behind the waiter does, in fact, make a cross.
OK, in these last few, it may not have taken hundreds of years to find the details, but I still like them a whole lot!
15.
The National Cathedral in Washington, DC, has a Darth Vader gargoyle they included after a contest in National Geographic in the 1980s.
16.
Also at the National Cathedral is a rock from the moon, embedded in a space-themed stained glass window at the top gifted to the cathedral by the Apollo 11 astronauts.
17.
Finally, Al Hirschfeld hid his daughter’s name, Nina, in the majority of his portraits. I actually wrote a whole post about it, and you can read it here!
Do you have a fun art fact? Tell me in the comments below!