Secret Meanings Hidden In Famous Works Of Art

Psychology Today says that when it comes to art, only humans create it. But here's the thing: They also add that if anyone were to take a long, hard look at the behavior of some animals, they do something that sort of lives next door to art. Take the birds who preen and perform, and who decorate nests in order to attract a mate. They're making something meaningful that moves the spirit of another, and isn't that what art is?

Humans have been creating works for a long time. According to the Smithsonian, what was believed to be the oldest piece of art ever discovered had been found on the wall of a cave in Indonesia. It was a huge depiction of a creature called a babirusa — also known as a pig-deer — and at the time it was painted more than 35,400 years ago, they would have lived side-by-side with the ancient humans who had painted the mural.

Researchers were able to tell a lot from the sketch, including the fact that the unknown artist had set out to draw a female babirusa — there were no tusks. Not all art is that straightforward, though, and as humankind has developed new techniques and skills for creating artistic masterpieces, it hasn't been unheard of for them to sneak some hidden meanings and messages into said works. Sometimes, it's taken centuries for critics, historians, and scholars to finally catch on to what an artist was really trying to get across in a work.

Jan van Eyck painted The Arnolfini Portrait in the 15th century, and at a glance, it's a perfectly ordinary piece depicting two people and a dog, standing in a bedroom. But there are some fascinating details that have spawned a ton of theories over the years — and as The Collector notes, they really are just speculation.

With a long-standing theory debunked in the 1990s, it's now thought that the two are Giovanni di Nicolao Arnolfini and wife Constanza Trenta ... but there's a problem. Costanza died in childbirth in 1433, and the date on the painting is 1434. But! There are a few clues that seem to indicate that this is a memorial painting, and the woman is actually dead. In addition to the man seeming to hold the woman's hand even as it's slipping away, there's also a gargoyle beside her — not exactly a favorable portent. And neither is the dog at her feet, a creature long thought to guide souls into the afterlife.

Most fascinating of all is perhaps the mirror on the wall. The side facing the man is decorated with scenes from Christ's life, and the other side depicts his death and resurrection. The chandelier over the couple is similarly split: Over the man's head, a candle still burns — as does his life. On the other side, though, the candle is spent and all that's left behind are drips of wax. The flame over her head has burned to an end.

In 1601, Caravaggio was commissioned to do The Supper at Emmaus. The scene is out of the Gospel of Luke, and it's basically a post-Resurrection Christ breaking bread with disciples who don't recognize him until the moment captured in the painting. Straightforward enough, but according to the BBC, there's one tiny detail that makes it mean something revolutionary.

What is it? A basket of fruit sits at the edge of the table, and two wicker twigs of the basket are broken. Just a bit of realism, or something else? Something else: The twigs are bent in the form of a nearly complete Ichthys, the fish that believers once used to identify themselves in a world where they could be persecuted for those beliefs. (The shadow behind the bowl is also in the shape of a fish's tail.) That "nearly complete" part is significant, too. In order to identify themselves, ancient Christians would draw half of the Ichthys on the ground. It was a seemingly harmless sort of thing to absent-mindedly do, and only those in the know — true believers — would know to finish the drawing. It's suggested that Caravaggio is asking the viewer whether or not they would finish this seemingly innocuous symbol, and believe.

Interestingly, Caravaggio's tormented life got pretty hairy after that — he died mysteriously in 1610 — and when he repainted another version of the same scene five years after the first, the bowl and the Ichthys were gone.

According to research done by Vatican guide Roy Doliner and Rabbi Benjamin Blech, there's a heck of a lot more on the ceiling than just Christian imagery. It started when he noticed two of the letters on the ceiling — aleph and ayin — were a Hebrew reference to Christ. They had only become visible after a restoration cleaned off centuries of grime, and it kicked off a massive investigation that turned up more.

Take his depiction of David and Goliath (left). They're positioned to form the letter gimel, which is connected to strength. He does it again with Judith (right): She's holding the head of Holofernes in the shape of another letter. That's het, which is connected to "loving kindness," says The Telegraph. There are a few other hidden messages, too. The prophet Zechariah was done in the likeness of Pope Julius II, and it's clear Michelangelo wasn't a fan — standing behind him is an angel making a gesture so obscene, it's mentioned in Dante's Inferno. (Doliner told The Wall Street Journal that he got away with it because the details were relatively small.) He also added some naked men wrapped in a very loving embrace, and the men? They were in heaven, an unthinkable idea in the mid-16th century.

So, what was the point of all this? Doliner suggests that Michelangelo wanted the ceiling to be a reminder that not only was Jesus a Jew, but that everyone would do well to remember that Judaism and Christianity go hand-in-hand: And, everyone's created in God's image. 

Starry Night is the other piece by Vincent van Gogh that's on the wall of every college dorm room. The swirls in van Gogh's work — which, incidentally, was painted in 1889 — are iconic, and here's where things get weird. Concord Consortium research associate Natalya St. Clair says (via ArsTechnica) that the swirls are pretty common among Impressionist painters. It's used to indicate movement, but it wasn't until decades later that anyone realized van Gogh had painted something else, too — when NASA's Hubble Telescope captured an image (inset) that looked a lot like Starry Night.

The photo was of dust clouds swirling around a supergiant star, and far from looking "kind of" like Starry Night, it was precisely what van Gogh illustrated in Starry Night — along with Wheatfield with Crows, and Road with Cypress and Star. When a group of physicists got together for a project led by Mexico's National Autonomous University, they compared digitized versions of van Gogh's work with the images captured by NASA, and found that they were nearly identical on a shockingly precise mathematical scale.

The researchers also noted that the more precise paintings were done at a time when van Gogh's life was most "turbulent," and when things calmed down for him, the phenomenon — known as Kolmogorov scaling — disappeared. Marcelo Gleiser explained: "[It was] as if his mind somehow tapped into a universal archetype where ... the painter's brush and nature's brush became one and the same."

The prints of Albrecht Durer are unmistakable, and according to Artsy, they're what helped turn printmaking into a legit art form. Durer's Young Couple Threatened by Death (The Promenade) was done in 1498, and at a glance, it's a perfectly ordinary sort of depiction of a couple with eyes only for each other, being stalked by a creepy skeleton waving an hourglass. Durer was a dark sort of guy — and that's not all that's hidden in this piece.

MPR reported on an exhibition of Durer's work in St. Peter, Minnesota, and this piece came up — particularly, the ultra-scandalous couple. Wait, what? The dress that the woman is wearing is, historians say, illegal under Nuremberg's insanely restrictive clothing laws of the era. And we know they're in Nuremberg, because there's a coded reference to the city etched into the neckline of the dress.

Neat, right? There's one more thing, though. Those clothing laws dictated what people could wear based on their social and marital status, and according to the Dallas Museum of Art, the giant ostrich feather stuck in the man's cap was reserved for bachelors. So far, so good. But then, check out the hat his lady's wearing. Those bonnets were worn by married women, so the seemingly innocent etching is actually depicting an adulterous affair.

Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa is so famous, it's easy to think that everyone has seen everything there is to see. While most of the focus is on her enigmatic smile — which reportedly drove at least one person to suicide — others have singled out her hands and eyelids as being the thing that gave the piece an aura of the supernatural. According to the BBC, it's her hands — and what they're on — that gives the entire piece new meaning.

The Mona Lisa is sitting in something called a pozzetto chair, which translates to "little well." And that changes a lot — it's no longer a portrait, some contend, but a landscape — and she's the central part of it. The river behind her doesn't just flow past her, it appears to feed into her "well." That's taken a step farther when adding in the fact that she's wearing a dress that's the color of algae, and the murkiness of the entire piece is likely exactly what Leonardo intended.

It turns out that the idea of a woman at or as a well is deeply spiritual. It connects women to the forces that sustain the planet and everything on it — water — and images of Christianity's women (such as Rachel, Rebekah, and even the Virgin Mary) at wells are plentiful. Water, the idea goes, can quench both physical and spiritual thirst, and by Mona Lisa's careful seat within a living well, Leonardo has turned her into "living water."