10 paintings with hidden meanings

After revelations that an artist hid a Monica Lewinsky reference in an official portrait of Bill Clinton, Mark Hudson lists 10 more paintings with secrets

Sandro Botticelli, Primavera, Uffizi Gallery, Florence
Sandro Botticelli, Primavera, Uffizi Gallery, Florence Credit: Photo: PRISMA ARCHIVO / ALAMY

Nicolas Poussin, Et In Arcadia Ego (Louvre, Paris)

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Poussin’s enigmatic image of ancient Greek shepherds gathered around a tomb inscribed with the words Et In Arcadia Ego – “Even in Arcadia I exist” – has given rise to more preposterous hypotheses than any other work of art. Crowning them all are the efforts British researchers Henry Lincoln, Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, who claimed the painting held the secret to hidden treasure in the south of France, where Jesus lived in wedded bliss with Mary Magdelene, siring the Merovingian kings of France. Rather than treasure, this magnificent nonsense led to an unsuccessful plagiarism suit against the grand master of art hokum, Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown.

Jan van Eyck, The Arnolfini Portrait (National Gallery, London)

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The urge to tell posterity “I was here” runs through art from Jackson Pollock, who allegedly hid a giant signature in one of his most famous abstract paintings, right back to Jan van Eyck, the grandfather of oil painting. His masterpiece, The Arnolfini Portrait, contains an elaborate Latin signature on the wall behind the couple, "Jan van Eyck was here 1434", while in the mirror above, two tiny figures, discernible only with a magnifying glass, stand in the position of the artist looking at the scene, one of them – generally presumed to be van Eyck himself – raising his hand in greeting to viewers down the ages (see image below).

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Leonardo da Vinci, The Last Supper (Santa Maria delle Grazie, Milan)

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Every one of Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code theories about Leonardo’s fresco has been debunked by scholars: St John the Evangelist is not Mary Magdelene, as Brown argues, and there is no disembodied hand. But that hasn’t stopped art historians adding a few wacky hypotheses of their own. Vatican researcher Sabrina Sforza Galitzia claims to have cracked the mathematical and astrological code contained in the half-moon window above Christ’s head, revealing portents of a "universal flood" which will begin on March 21, 4006, and end on November 1 the same year, destroying the world, but marking "a new start for humanity".

Francisco de Goya, Naked Maja (Prado Museum, Madrid)

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Seized by the Inquisition as “indecent and prejudicial to the public good”, Goya’s reclining nude is widely considered the sexiest painting of all time. The fact that the head and body don’t quite connect suggests a carefully constructed identity for the brazen beauty on the bed. But who in fact was she? Speculation has fallen on Pepita Tudo, mistress of Manuel de Godoy, Spain’s controversial prime minister during the Peninsular War, who may have commissioned the painting, and the far more glamorous figure of the Maria del Pilar, the beautiful and passionate Duchess of Alba, one half of the wealthiest couple in Spain, with whom Goya is said to have had an affair. While recent scholars have poo-poohed this idea, it is lent credence by the number of times the duchess’s features appear throughout Goya’s oeuvre.

Titian, Pope Paul III and his Grandsons (Museo di Capodimonte, Naples)

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A brutal murder lies at the heart of this edgy and still controversial group portrait. The ailing pope turns in apparent rebuke towards his younger grandson Ottavio, who has claimed the Dukedom of Parma and Piacenza against the wishes of his grandfather, following the stabbing of his father Pier Luigi Farnese. His elder brother, Cardinal Alessandro, effective ruler of the Church at the time, looks on, his hand on the papal chair. While modern critics have seen the painting as a critique of papal corruption, Titian seems to have been only interested in winning an ecclesiastical living for his feckless clergyman son Pomponio. Frustrated in his endeavours he returned to his home city, Venice, leaving this ambivalent masterpiece unfinished.

Sandro Botticelli, Primavera (Uffizi Gallery, Florence)

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A joyous celebration of female beauty and gaiety? An exuberant pagan ode to the season of renewal? Nothing so simple. Botticelli’s masterpiece is not only a botanist’s dream, with 500 identifiable plant species, but has been variously interpreted as containing the clues to a plot against the Medici and an attempt to reconcile the ideals of Christianity, Judaism and Islam, a pet project of Neo-Platonist intellectuals at the Medici court. If that seems far-fetched, Renaissance Florence rivalled Sixties California for wacky theories and spurious gurus. Botticelli attached himself to one of them, the hellfire preacher Savonarola, and his work took on a more austere and mystical turn, before his spiritual guide was burned in the city’s main square in 1498.

Hans Holbein the Younger, The Ambassadors (National Gallery, London)

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These well-dressed gentlemen may appear in the pink of youthful health and confidence, but look from the lower left or right and the diagonal blur in the foreground reveals itself as a skull rendered in anamorphic perspective. The idea of the memento mori – the reminder of death – was common, though why it should have been so prominently attached to these young men, French ambassadors to London, remains a mystery. The painting may have been designed to a hang on a stairwell, so that the passing householder encountered the hollow-eyed skull as a salutary reminder of the vanity of earthly things.

Johannes Vermeer, The Music Lesson (Royal Collection, London)

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However cool and serene they appear on the surface, Vermeer’s paintings are full of symbols of passion and hints at the blatantly erotic. Here a young woman touches the keys of a virginals – an instrument associated with purity – apparently absorbed in study as her tutor looks on. A closer look in the mirror above, however, shows her looking towards him, distracted by this male presence. The pitcher of wine on the table is an aphrodisiac, the large stringed instrument on the floor clearly understood as a phallic symbol even today, while our relatively low viewpoint on the far side of the room puts us in the position of voyeur.

Michelangelo, The Sistine Chapel Ceiling (Rome)

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No self-respecting 16th century artist would have undertaken a project on the scale of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling without throwing in at least a few puzzles to confuse later viewers. According to one recent theory, the ceiling’s nine episodes from the book of Genesis are a set of kabbalistic messages, with the poses of the figures spelling out letters in the Hebrew alphabet. David and Goliath form the letter gimel, which symbolises strength in the Jewish mystical system – all part of an attempt, on Michelangelo’s part, it is argued, to create a bridge between Catholicism and Judaism. Other commentators, many of them doctors, have managed to piece together most of the human nervous system and other essential body parts in the ceiling’s vast design.

Giorgione, The Tempest (Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice)

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With its mysterious male and female figures positioned beneath a thunderous sky outside the walls of an unnamed city, every aspect of Giorgione’s TheTempest has been subjected to endless scholarly conjecture – making it the world’s most enigmatic painting. The man has been variously interpreted as a soldier, shepherd, gypsy or young aristocrat, the woman as a gypsy, a prostitute, Eve, Mary on the Flight – among countless other loonier speculations. And what about those apparently purposeless, but clearly significant truncated columns? Finally the painting’s subject has become its own unfathomabilty – a ‘haunted work’, according to the writer Jan Morris, inhabited by the spirit of the artist himself.