4 Famous Paintings with Jaw-Dropping Hidden Details
Great artists use imagination, skill, and patience.
Greater artists convey complex concepts, ideas, and messages within a single work.
The greatest artists bury hidden treasures within their masterpieces, delighting onlookers for centuries after they’ve passed.
Today we're going to look at four unbelievable, jaw-dropping hidden details buried within famous paintings that you’ve never seen before!
The Prophet Zechariah Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo, 1512
The Sistine Chapel represents the pinnacle of High Renaissance Art and is considered by many to be the epitome of Michelangelo's work. This vast blank canvas of the Chapel allowed him to display his genius and show his mischievous side. The area devoted to Zechariah is no different. The Prophet sits on a marble stair, reading a tome with fierce concentration. Two angels rest on his shoulders, seemingly equally enraptured. However, first glances can be deceiving. A closer look reveals that one of the cherubs is "flipping the fig," the old-fashioned way of showing someone the one-finger salute. Commentators attribute this to Michelangelo's contempt towards the then reigning Pope, we like it because it proves giving the bird is as old as time.
View of Scheveningen Sands, Hendrick van Anthonissen c.1641, The Fitzwilliam Museum
Our favorite thing about Anthonissen's View of Scheveningen Sands is how it combined ancient secrets, careful restoration, and "duh, how did we not realize that" all in one. The depiction of the Dutch seaside quietly resided in the Fitzwilliam Museum for 140 years, only earning the embarrassingly occasional head scratch. Why exactly? Because the group of people seemed to be staring at, well, nothing. Laymen and experts gave it a "guess Dutch people are weird" shoulder shrug and moved on. That is until restorative artist Shan Kuang came along in the mid-2010s. Careful examination revealed the behemoth, waiting for a century and a half to be discovered.
The Persistence of Memory, Salvador Dali, 1931, MoMa New York
What makes art intimidating for some is the perception that everything must have a lofty deeper meaning. The thrill lies in realizing that the utterly mundane can cause seismic shifts in popular culture. Take Dali's surrealist masterpiece, The Persistence of Memory. The oozing, jelly-like forms of the clock faces represent the artists' obsession with texture at that time. The real fun isn't in the unusual shapes but rather in deciphering the inspiration behind them. Contemporaries hailed the piece as an artistic representation of Einstein's recently released Theory of Special Relativity. The reality is much more humble. For Dali, the clock faces symbolized melting Camembert cheese, collapsing under the sun's fiery rays. We camembelieve it!
Madonna with Saint Giovannino, Domenico Ghirlandaio (Or Not?), 15th Century, Palazzo Vecchio, Venice
The painting “Madonna with Saint Giovannino” is mysterious in more ways than one. Firstly due to the uncertainty around its origin, three different artists are the potential culprits behind this 600-year-old enigma, with the front runner being Italian artist Domenico Ghirlandaio. Secondly, and most significantly, are the oddities contained within it. The background reveals a man and his dog gazing fixedly upwards at an unidentified object ostensibly flying through the sky. That's right, an Unidentified Flying Object. Speculation abounds about whether this illustrates a long-lost symbolic religious meaning or reveals that discussions around extraterrestrial life began a lot sooner than we thought. For us, it's how baby Jesus has perfectly chiseled abs.
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