8 Prestigious Paintings That Contain Little-Known Secrets and Meanings

Each painting, like each artist, has its own story, its mysteries and its secrets. And sometimes, illustrious masterpieces, familiar mainly to connoisseurs of this art, reveal a different side known by few.

O awesome.club constantly searches for little-known facts related to famous paintings. And the opportunity to look again at a work and discover one of its secrets seems priceless.

The strange object in Hans Holbein’s painting The Ambassadors that looks like a flying saucer is actually a vivid example of anamorphosis: a distorted projection of anything or anyone, visible in its true form only from a certain angle of view. . The viewer must look at this work from the bottom left to see a large human skull on it. He is placed in this ceremonial portrait as a memento mori, a symbolic reminder of the transience of life and the vanity of all that exists.

Paul Gauguin’s painting, Breton Village Under the Snow, after his death, was auctioned with six others for a value considered negligible. However, the most regrettable was the sale of the work under the name of Niagara Falls. The appraiser simply didn’t know the correct position of the painting and for some reason turned it upside down and saw one of North America’s most famous natural attractions.

The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican is decorated with a series of magnificent frescoes. Shortly before Pope Julius II entrusted Michelangelo with this work, they had a major disagreement. Some biographers claim that the idea of ​​commissioning the sculptor to decorate the building’s vault, whose walls were painted by the most famous painters of the late 15th century (such as Botticelli, Ghirlandaio and Perugino), came from malefactors who wanted to shame Michelangelo, who had never before had been involved in large-scale pictorial projects.

According to some experts, in addition to giving the world a masterpiece, Michelangelo also expressed his attitude towards the Pope: one of the angels behind the shoulder of the Prophet Zechariah crosses his fingers and makes a sign of the fig, which in some countries is considered a rude gesture.

Georges Seurat is a famous impressionist painter and creator of a special painting method called pointillism. When approaching his canvases, the observer will see that they consist of small brushstrokes, which only merge into a complete painting from a distance. It is known that there is not a single known self-portrait of the artist. However, it is possible to find it under infrared light.

On the canvas Jovem Maquilhando-se, in place of the vase of flowers added later, there was a self-portrait of the artist himself. He painted over the vase because a friend suggested that the paint had turned out weird. Furthermore, the woman in the painting was the pregnant lover of Seurat, at the time a married man.

Historians still debate who served as the model for Jean-Etienne Liotard’s painting La Belle Chocolatière. Many believe the version that she was Anna Baldauf. The story goes that, one day, a young prince named Dietrichstein went to have a cup of chocolate in a Viennese cafe, where he was attended by a beautiful girl from an impoverished noble family. The prince fell in love and, despite opposition from his family, they were married. As a wedding gift, he commissioned a portrait of his beloved in the same outfit in which he first saw her.

Admirers of the Yves Saint Laurent fashion house will unmistakably recognize the above abstract art and say, “Yes, that’s what the Mondrian collection is all about!” In the 1960s, the dresses from this collection were at the height of fashion and graced the cover of Vogue magazine. Popular clothing manufacturers then rushed to copy the theme.

But not everyone knows that one of the sources of inspiration for the French stylist was the painting Composition with Red, Blue and Yellow, created precisely by the artist Piet Mondrian, in 1929.

In the upper left corner of the painting The Scream, by Munch, there is an almost imperceptible inscription in pencil: “It could only have been painted by a madman”. For many years, critics debated who could have written that line: an unknown vandal or the artist himself? And in the end they concluded that it was Munch himself.

The catalyst for the painting’s inscription is believed to be Munch’s idea of ​​responding to public criticism and speculation about his mental state after the exhibition of his work.

Gustav Klimt drew over a hundred sketches for The Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer. So many “drafts” were made to try to hide a small deformity in Adele’s finger. That’s why her hand is in an unusual position.

Have you ever identified something different or curious in a known painting? Are you curious to know more about the topic? Tell us in the comments, we’re curious.