Art is not only a source of inspiration but also a great mystery. Artists often add curious little details to their paintings or leave messages that are impossible to perceive at first glance.
We brought together works of art with unexpected secrets. If you get to the end of the article, there’s a bonus waiting for you – one of the weirdest assumptions about the Mona Lisa.
Mysteries Hidden In Famous Paintings
9. The Wrong Ear
Vincent van Gogh’s Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear depicts the artist with an injured right ear. In reality, he cut off his left ear. The discrepancy is explained by the fact that van Gogh uses a mirror to create an image of himself.
8. The Painting Under The Painting
If you look closely at Pablo Picasso’s The Old Guitarist, you can see a dim female silhouette behind the man’s head.
After taking infrared and X-ray images of the painting, researchers at the Chicago Art Institute discovered some other shapes hidden underneath.
The artist probably did not have enough money to buy new canvases and had to paint on the old ones.
7. The Night Watch Is Set At Daytime
During the restoration of The Shooting Company by Frans Banning Cocq and Willem van Ruytenburch, by Rembrandt, in 1947, better known as The Night Watch in 1947, it was cleaned of a thick layer of soot. After that, it became evident that the scene portrayed in the painting takes place not at night, but in daylight.
6. The Sistine Chapel’s Anatomical Code
An image of the human brain is discernible not only in The Creation of Adam by Michelangelo but also in another fresco in the Sistine Chapel: the separation of light and darkness.
Look at God’s neck: if you superimpose it onto a photo of the human brain, as seen from below, you’ll get a perfect overlap of the lines.
5. Rembrandt’s Squint
Margaret Livingstone and Bevil Conway studied Rembrandt’s self-portraits and showed that the painter suffered from stereoblindness.
This peculiarity made the painter perceive the world a little differently: he saw reality in 2D instead of 3D. However, it is possible that stereoblindness helped Rembrandt create his immortal works of art.
4. Vengeance To Lovers
One of Gustav Klimt’s most famous paintings portrays Adele Bloch-Bauer. It was commissioned by her husband, Sugar Baron Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer.
He discovered that Adele and Klimt had an affair and believed that, after hundreds of sketches, the painter would come to hate his mistress.
Routine work really made the feelings between the sitter and the artist cool down
3. Prediction Of The End Of The World
Italian researcher Sabrina Sforza Galitzia has proposed an unusual interpretation of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper.
She is sure that in his painting the artist left a prediction of the end of the world, which will take place on March 21, 4006.
To reach this conclusion, the researcher deciphered the mathematical and astrological code of the painting.
This is not the only mystery of the Last Supper. The hands of Christ and the apostles, together with the bread on the table, form something that can be read as musical notation. Upon testing, it does sound like a short tune.
2. The World In Yellow
Almost all of Vincent van Gogh’s paintings are dominant yellow. Professor Paul Wolf explains this as a side effect of an epilepsy remedy that changes color perception. The artist’s world could really seem as we see it on his canvases.
1. Mozart And The Masons
There is solid evidence that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a Mason. Even in his childhood portrait of Pietro Antonio Lorenzoni, we can see a Masonic symbol: a hidden hand that indicates a hierarchical position in the secret society.
Toothless Mona Lisa
Dentist and art specialist Joseph Borkowski has carefully studied Leonardo da Vinci’s painting and claims to have revealed the secret behind La Gioconda’s smile. He believes that she lost her front teeth and that influenced her facial expression.
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