In the Nation­al Gallery there hangs a por­trait of an unknown woman, paint­ed by an unknown artist around 1470 some­where in south­west­ern Ger­many. This may sound like an art­work of lit­tle note, but it does boast one high­ly con­spic­u­ous mark of dis­tinc­tion: a house­fly. It’s not that the por­traitist was in such thrall to real­ism that he includ­ed an insect that hap­pened to drop into the sit­ting; at first glance, the fly looks as if it belongs to our real­i­ty, and has alight­ed on the can­vas itself.  Why would a painter, pre­sum­ably com­mis­sioned at the con­sid­er­able expense of the sit­ter’s fam­i­ly, include such a seem­ing­ly bizarre detail? Nation­al Gallery cura­tor Francesca Whitlum-Coop­er offers answers in the video below.

“It’s a joke,” says Whitlum-Coop­er. “And it’s a joke that works on dif­fer­ent lev­els, because on the one hand, the fly has been tricked into think­ing this is a real head­dress,” fooled by the painter’s mas­tery of that most dif­fi­cult col­or for light and shad­ow, white.

“But obvi­ous­ly there’s a dou­ble joke, because we, look­ing at it, think, ‘Oh my gosh, there’s a fly on that paint­ing!’ ” It is our very instinct to shoo the bug away that tells us “we’ve been duped, because actu­al­ly, every­thing here is two-dimen­sion­al. This is just paint. And the skill of the artist is that they’ve been able to take that paint, and brush, and a bit of wood, and con­jure it into some­thing that feels so life­like, we do believe — even just for a sec­ond — that’s a fly sit­ting on that pic­ture.”

Five cen­turies lat­er the joke still works, though it could well be more than a joke. One the­o­ry put forth here and there in the com­ments holds that the fly func­tions as a reminder of imper­ma­nence, of decay, of mor­tal­i­ty. If so, it sug­gests that the sub­ject of this por­trait may already have been dead by the time of its paint­ing, a notion sup­port­ed by the sym­bol­ic weight of the for­get-me-nots in her hand. (One com­menter even argues that the artist is none oth­er than the famed Albrecht Dür­er, and that the woman depict­ed is his late moth­er.) Though it may not rank among the great works of art, this mys­te­ri­ous image nev­er­the­less shares with them the qual­i­ty of mul­ti­va­lence. The fly could be a gag, and it could be a memen­to mori — but why not both?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

19th-Cen­tu­ry Skele­ton Alarm Clock Remind­ed Peo­ple Dai­ly of the Short­ness of Life: An Intro­duc­tion to the Memen­to Mori

A Restored Ver­meer Paint­ing Reveals a Por­trait of a Cupid Hid­den for Over 350 Years

What Made Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus a Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Paint­ing

The Genius of Albrecht Dür­er Revealed in Four Self-Por­traits

What Makes the Mona Lisa a Great Paint­ing: A Deep Dive

Down­load 35,000 Works of Art from the Nation­al Gallery, Includ­ing Mas­ter­pieces by Van Gogh, Gau­guin, Rem­brandt & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

Pho­to­graph by Pierre Jahan/Archives des museés nationaux

Twice, we’ve brought you posts explain­ing how the Mona Lisa – the most famous paint­ing in the world – went from near obscu­ri­ty to glob­al noto­ri­ety almost overnight, after an employ­ee of the Lou­vre pur­loined and tried to hide it in 1911. Accu­sa­tions flew – includ­ing very pub­lic accu­sa­tions against Pablo Picas­so; sala­cious rumors cir­cu­lat­ed; the enig­mat­ic smile of Lisa del Gio­con­da — the Flo­ren­tine silk merchant’s wife depict­ed in the paint­ing – appeared in black and white pho­tographs in news­pa­pers around the globe. When she returned to the muse­um, vis­i­tors couldn’t, and still can­not, wait to see her in per­son. As great as that sto­ry is, what hap­pened a few decades lat­er under the Nazi-con­trolled Vichy gov­ern­ment makes for an even bet­ter tale.

By the 1930s, the Mona Lisa was deemed the most impor­tant work of art in France’s most impor­tant muse­um. With due respect to the Mon­u­ments Men (and unsung Mon­u­ments Women), before the Allies arrived to res­cue many of Europe’s price­less works of art, French civ­il ser­vants, stu­dents, and work­men did it them­selves, sav­ing most of the Lou­vre’s entire col­lec­tion. The hero of the sto­ry, Jacques Jau­jard, direc­tor of France’s Nation­al Muse­ums, has gone down in his­to­ry as “the man who saved the Lou­vre” — also the title of an award-win­ning French doc­u­men­tary (see trail­er below). Men­tal Floss pro­vides con­text for Jau­jard’s hero­ism:

After Ger­many annexed Aus­tria in March of 1938, Jau­jard… lost what­ev­er small hope he had that war might be avoid­ed. He knew Britain’s pol­i­cy of appease­ment was­n’t going to keep the Nazi wolf from the door, and an inva­sion of France was sure to bring destruc­tion of cul­tur­al trea­sures via bomb­ings, loot­ing, and whole­sale theft. So, togeth­er with the Lou­vre’s cura­tor of paint­ings René Huyghe, Jau­jard craft­ed a secret plan to evac­u­ate almost all of the Lou­vre’s art, which includ­ed 3600 paint­ings alone.

On the day Ger­many and the Sovi­et Union signed the Nonag­gres­sion Pact, August 25, 1939, Jau­jard closed the Lou­vre for “repairs” for three days while staff, “stu­dents from the École du Lou­vre, and work­ers form the Grands Mag­a­zines du Lou­vre depart­ment store took paint­ings out of their frames… and moved stat­ues and oth­er objects from their dis­plays with wood­en crates.”

The stat­ues includ­ed the three ton Winged Nike of Samoth­race (see a pho­to of its move here), the Egypt­ian Old King­dom Seat­ed Scribe, and the Venus de Milo. All of these, like the oth­er works of art, would be moved to chateaus in the coun­try­side for safe keep­ing. On August 28, “hun­dreds of trucks orga­nized into con­voys car­ried 1000 crates of ancient and 268 crates of paint­ings and more” into the Loire Val­ley.

Includ­ed in that haul of trea­sures was the Mona Lisa, placed in a cus­tom case, cush­ioned with vel­vet. Where oth­er works received labels of yel­low, green, and red dots accord­ing to their lev­el of impor­tance, the Mona Lisa was marked with three red dots — the only work to receive such high pri­or­i­ty. It was trans­port­ed by ambu­lance, gen­tly strapped to a stretch­er. After leav­ing the muse­um, the paint­ing would be moved five times, “includ­ing to Loire Val­ley cas­tles and a qui­et abbey.” The Nazis would loot much of what was left in the Lou­vre, and force it to re-open in 1940 with most of its gal­leries stark­ly emp­ty. But the Mona Lisa — at the top of Hitler’s list of art­works to expro­pri­ate — remained safe, as did many thou­sands more art­works Jau­jard believed were the “her­itage of all human­i­ty,” as Inge Laino, Paris Muse Direc­tor, says in the France 24 seg­ment above.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

How the Mona Lisa Went From Being Bare­ly Known, to Sud­den­ly the Most Famous Paint­ing in the World (1911)

How Did the Mona Lisa Become the World’s Most Famous Paint­ing?: It’s Not What You Think

The 16,000 Art­works the Nazis Cen­sored and Labeled “Degen­er­ate Art”: The Com­plete His­toric Inven­to­ry Is Now Online

The Louvre’s Entire Col­lec­tion Goes Online: View and Down­load 480,00 Works of Art

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness