15 Famous Paintings With Hidden Secrets

Hidden beneath the surface of these paintings are secrets that no one knew existed, but once they were uncovered, they changed everything we thought we knew about them and the people who painted them. Join me for today's video. We're going to count down 15 famous paintings with hidden secrets. Number 15. The Scream by Edvard Munch, 1893. There is a message written on The Scream. It's faint pencil lines in the top left corner of the canvas, visible to the naked eye, but almost impossible to read without a close inspection. In Norwegian, it says, can only have been painted by a madman. For over a century, art historians, curators, and museum staff debated who had written it. The most widely held theory was that it was an act of vandalism. Some offended viewer who had managed to get close enough to the painting to scrawl their verdict on it. In 2021, after decades of speculation, the National Museum of Norway put the question to rest with infrared analysis that made the pencil marks clearly legible. The handwriting was Edvard Munch's own. The timeline they pieced together is more interesting than a vandal would have been. Munch painted The Scream in 1893, but didn't exhibit it in Norway until 1895. When it was shown in Christiania, now Oslo, the response was ferocious. Critics dismissed it, and a medical student named John Scharfenberg publicly argued at a student debate where Munch was believed to be present that the paintings were evidence Munch was not of sound mind. A prominent museum director wrote that one could no longer consider Munch a serious man with a normal brain. Munch was deeply wounded. He wrote about that response extensively in his diaries. At some point after the exhibition, probably in 1895 or shortly thereafter, he picked up a pencil and wrote his rebuttal directly onto the painting itself. The curator who confirmed the finding described it as both ironic and an expression of vulnerability. Munch, who suffered throughout his life from anxiety and depression and was hospitalized for a breakdown in 1908, was not denying his struggles. He was taking control of the narrative. If the world wanted to call him a madman, he would be the one to put it in writing. 14. The Old Guitarist, Pablo Picasso in 1903 There are two hidden paintings inside The Old Guitarist, and one of them you can see with your own eyes without any special equipment. Picasso's iconic Blue Period work, a gaunt, blind old man hunched over his guitar in a monochrome wash of blue, contains a figure that peeks through the visible surface if you know where to look. In the area of the old man's neck, another face is faintly visible, angled to the left. It belongs to a young woman. She was there first. Picasso painted The Old Guitarist in 1903 while living in Barcelona, in conditions of genuine poverty. He couldn't always afford new canvases, and the practice of painting over previous work was a financial necessity rather than a stylistic choice during his period. When conservators at the Art Institute of Chicago analyzed the painting using infrared imaging in 1998, they found not one but two previous compositions beneath the visible surface. The clearest revealed a young mother sitting with a child beside her and a kneeling figure nearby. In another layer, there was evidence of a standing woman with her arms raised. Neither composition was ever finished. Picasso abandoned both and painted The Old Guitarist directly over them. The reasons for the changes remain unknown. Picasso himself hinted later in life that discoveries lay under his early works. He told interviews in the 1950s that people should be x-raying his canvases, but he never specified what or why. What the image revealed was that the woman's face visible in the old man's neck area belongs to the mother from the abandoned composition below, her features bleeding faintly through the layers of blue period paint. The Art Institute subsequently found a sketch Picasso had sent to a friend showing the same mother and child composition, confirming what the infrared had uncovered. The Old Guitarist has been playing over two unfinished stories ever since. 13. A Patch of Grass – Vincent Van Gogh, 1887 At first glance, Patch of Grass is not a painting that demands much of you. It's exactly what the name suggests, a small square of ground painted in the impressionistic, vivid style of Van Gogh's Paris period, showing grass, flowers, and earth in loose, energetic brushwork. Nothing in the visible composition suggests there's anything underneath, and yet in 2008, when the painting was subjected to macro x-ray fluorescent scanning, a technique that had only recently become available and measures the chemical elements in different paint layers, an entire portrait of a peasant woman emerged from beneath the vegetation. She had been there since 1887, completely invisible, covered by a field of grass. Van Gogh was known to paint over his early work regularly, partly out of poverty and partly because he moved quickly and revised constantly. Conservators had long suspected that many of his canvases concealed earlier images. He's estimated to have painted over his own work roughly a third of the time. What made Patch of Grass discovery kind of cool is how thoroughly the woman had been erased and how clearly she reappeared. The macro XRF scanner works by detecting the composition of different pigments, in this case mercury and antimony, and the darker, warmer tones of the woman's face and clothing. They were clearly distinguishable from the greens and blues of the grass above. Her features, the head scarf, and the general composition of a bust-length portrait were all recoverable. Who she was is unknown. Van Gogh painted many peasant figures during his earlier Dutch period before moving to Paris, and the style of underpainting is consistent with that earlier work. The prevailing theory is that he bought a canvas from the Netherlands, painted over an existing composition when he arrived in Paris, and replaced the portrait of rural poverty with an impressionist study of light and color. Two very different phases of his life, one laid directly over the other, separated by a thin layer of oil paint and 120 years of invisibility. 12. THE PORTRAIT OF DON RAMON SATOY, FRANCISCO DE GOYA, 1823 Francisco de Goya painted the portrait of Don Ramon Satoy in 1823, a formal likeness of a Spanish judge, rendered in Goya's mature style. It's a competent, dignified piece of portraiture. It's also, under that dignified surface, concealing something considerably more politically explosive. When art historians Koen Janssens and Joris Dieck applied advanced x-ray imaging to the portrait in 2008, they found a hidden figure beneath Satoy, a man in a military uniform so specific and elaborate that the embellishments on it could be identified. Those embellishments belonged to one of the highest-ranking orders of chivalry created by Joseph Bonaparte, the brother of Napoleon, placed on the Spanish throne. Under the laws of that order, only Joseph himself and 15 of his generals were entitled to wear that uniform. Goya had painted a collaborator, a man who served the French occupiers during the Napoleonic Wars, and then painted directly over him with the face of a Spanish judge. Whether this was done to protect the man underneath, or to conceal Goya's own connections to the occupation, or simply because he needed the canvas, has never been established. The identity of the hidden figure has also never been confirmed. The face in the underpainting was not completed. Either Goya abandoned the portrait for reasons unknown, or he deliberately left the figures vague. None of the 15 generals who were entitled to wear that uniform have been conclusively matched to the partial face that the x-rays recovered. But what the discovery does clarify is the political atmosphere in which Goya was working. He had served as a court painter under the French occupation, and was widely suspected of collaboration. When the Bourbon monarchy was restored under Ferdinand VII, Goya navigated a dangerous period of potential accusation. Painting over a figure in Bonapartist uniform and replacing him with a respectable Spanish judge was exactly the kind of thing a man in Goya's position might choose to do. 11. The View of the Scheveningen Sands, Hedrick van Antonesen, 1641 For 140 years, curators at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge were mildly puzzled by a 17th century Dutch beach scene. The painting showed groups of people gathered on a sandy shore near the Hague, figures clustered on the beach, others peering down from the dunes above. It was a winter day, the sea was grey, and absolutely nothing was happening. Nothing about the composition made compositional sense. Why were all these people standing in the cold, looking at the ocean? What were they looking at? Well, the answer turned out to be the largest animal on earth. In 2014, a postgraduate conservator named Sean Kwong was assigned to clean the painting's yellowed varnish as part of a gallery refurbishment. As she worked across the surface, the figure appeared on the horizon that hadn't been visible before. Then, a shape next to the figure that looked like a sail, then a fin, and beneath a thick layer of overpaint applied at some point in the 18th or 19th century was a full-size beached sperm whale, the actual subject of the painting, which someone had decided to remove, probably because the presence of a large dead animal was considered offensive or commercially undesirable. Without it, the painting was just a group of cold Dutch people on a beach with no apparent reason to be there. With it, though, the composition was suddenly obvious. This was a crowd scene, the whale was the spectacle, and the figure Kwong had spotted standing on the horizon was a man balanced on the whale's back, apparently measuring its length. Van Antonissen had painted this scene from a real-life observation. There was a surge of whale strandings along the Dutch coast in the early 17th century, and the events were well documented. The whale was the entire point of this picture. It had been sitting in the museum's collection since 1873, confusing everyone who looked at it. The Fitzwilliam now displays the painting with the whale restored to its rightful place, and the composition finally makes sense. Number 10. The Arnolfini Portrait, Jan van Eyck, 1434. The most famous subject in the Arnolfini Portrait is not this couple. It's the small convex mirror on the back wall, barely a few inches across, which reflects the entire room in its curved surface, including the backs of the two figures in the foreground, the bed, the chandelier, and in the open doorway, two additional men who are not otherwise visible anywhere in the painting. One of those men is almost certainly Jan van Eyck himself. Directly above the mirror painted on the wall in elaborate gothic lettering is his signature, Johannes de Eyck, Fautique, 1434, or Jan van Eyck was here in 1434. It reads less like an artist's signature and more like graffiti. The mirror, though, is extraordinary for its ambition. Van Eyck painted the curved reflection of an entire room, including all of its furniture and occupants, at a scale of approximately three inches. The light hitting each individual amber bead hanging beside it is rendered precisely, including both the reflection on the top of each bead and the light passing through them and illuminating the lower face in a different color. To achieve this, van Eyck is believed to have used a magnifying glass. There's really no other way to explain the detail, but the mirror raises questions that have never been fully resolved. The two figures reflecting entering the doorway have been identified as van Eyck and his assistant, but nobody's been able to confirm that. There's also debate about what the painting is actually depicting, whether the couple are being married, whether they're already married and this is a legal document of some kind, or whether the woman is already dead and this is a memorial portrait. One scholar in 2003 identified the woman as Castanza Trenta, the merchant's first wife, who had died the year before the painting was made. If she's correct, every element of the composition, the snuffed candle on the woman's side of the chandelier, the passion scenes in the mirror's frame, the entire staging reads completely differently. The painting hangs in the National Gallery in London, but Eyck is still in Number 9. Las Meninas, Diego Velazquez, 1656. Las Meninas does not have a hidden message in the conventional sense. What it hides is something harder to locate, the answer to the question of what exactly you're looking at. The painting shows a room in the royal palace in Madrid. In the center stands the five-year-old infant Margarita, surrounded by her ladies-in-waiting, two court dwarves, a large dog, and a chaperone. To the left, partly behind a huge canvas, facing away from the viewer, stands Velazquez himself, with paintbrush in hand, looking directly out of the painting at you. On the back wall, small and faint, a mirror reflects the upper bodies of King Philip IV and Queen Mariana. In the far doorway, the chamberlain stands frozen, mid-step silhouetted against the light. The question that has occupied art historians for nearly four decades is this, whose point of view is the viewer occupying? If the king and queen are reflected in the mirror, they're standing where you're standing, which means Velazquez is not painting you, he's painting them. The canvas he's working on, the one with its face turned away so you can't see what's on it, is most likely a double portrait of the royal couple. And the entire scene, the infanta, the ladies, the dwarves, is simply what happened in the room while the sitting was taking place. Or perhaps none of that. Some historians argue the mirror reflects not the actual monarchs, but their image from Velazquez's canvas, making the painting kind of a meta-portrait about the act of painting itself. Velazquez shows not what he's painting, but the effect that it has. The king and queen can see their portrait being made. They see themselves made eternal by his brush. The red cross of the order of Santiago on Velazquez's chest was not awarded to him until three years after the painting was finished. The king had it added to the canvas after his death, and according to one account, Philip painted it himself. Number eight, the Mona Lisa, Leonardo da Vinci, 1503 to 1519. The Mona Lisa has no eyebrows. Now this is immediately obvious once you notice it, and essentially it's impossible to unnotice it afterwards. Whether Leonardo omitted them deliberately as a stylistic choice, or whether they were painted and later removed during cleaning, has really never been definitively resolved. In 2007, a French engineer claimed that ultra-high resolution scans showed traces of an original eyebrow that had faded over time. The Louvre has not confirmed this. Infrared and x-ray analysis has revealed that the painting was significantly altered during its creation. The subject's hands were repositioned. The size of her face was changed. In one earlier layer, she was depicted wearing an elaborate pearl headdress that was subsequently painted over. The background landscape, which nobody has been able to identify with certainty despite 500 years of effort, was painted before the figure not after, which was unusual for the period, and suggested Leonardo had a specific composition in mind from the beginning. The landscape itself, though, remains one of art history's most contentious unsolved problems. At least four different Italian locations have been claimed as the source of the background. A bridge near Arezzo in Tuscany, a lake near Lecco in Lombardy, a valley in the Montefeltro region, and a stretch of the Arno near Bobbio. Multiple scholars using historical records and analysis and drone photography have each concluded with certainty that their location is correct and all others are wrong. Leonardo's own notebooks do not settle this question. The smile, though, famously changes depending on where you look. Harvard researchers in 2000 found that when you look directly at her mouth, the expression appears neutral. When your gaze moves to her eyes and the smile falls into your peripheral vision, the corners of her mouth appear to curve upward. Her expression was specifically engineered to be impossible to read head-on. Not because Leonardo couldn't paint a clear expression, but because painting an ambiguous one was considerably harder and considerably more interesting. Let us know in the comments below which painting was your favorite, and please drop this video a like to support Top5s. 7. Young Woman Powdering Herself, Surratt, 1889 In the top left corner of Surratt's Young Woman Powdering Herself, there's a bamboo picture frame containing a vase of flowers. It looks decorative, unremarkable, and placed there purely to balance the composition. It is none of those things. Behind that vase of flowers, concealed by a thin layer of paint, applied in a hurry before the painting went on public display, is Surratt's own face. It's the only self-portrait he ever painted. He covered it over because a friend made a joke. The woman in the painting is Madeleine Knobloch, Surratt's secret mistress. Surratt kept their relationship hidden from his family and his social circle. They moved together into a small 5-meter room in a courtyard off of Paris Side Street, and he acknowledged the paternity of their son in the civil registers, but told almost nobody. When he painted Young Woman Powdering Herself for the 1890 Salon des Indépendants, he included himself in the bamboo mirror on the wall, watching her, reflected, holding a brush. Seen together in the painting, they would have been in the same room. He just wanted to put himself there. He showed the painting to a friend before the exhibition. The friend, who had no idea about the relationship, looked at the reflection and said it was comical, presumably that someone had included such an odd self-portrait in what was supposed to be a private interior scene. The comment alarmed Surratt, and he realized the over his own face and submitted the painting to the exhibition, with Madeleine's identity listed simply as his model. Infrared scanning in 2014 recovered the image beneath the flowers, an elongated face, a pointed beard, and a hand holding a paintbrush. It matches the known likeness of Surratt closely enough to confirm who it is, and he died the following year, age 31, taking most of this secret with him. 6. The Last Supper In 2007, an Italian musician named Giovanni Maria Palla announced that he had found a piece of music hidden inside The Last Supper. By reading the positions of the bread rolls and the hands of the apostles on the table as musical notes, following them left to right, the direction Leonardo wrote in his notebooks, a coherent forty-second musical composition, emerged. Palla identified it as a hymn-like piece consistent with the style of the period, and the musical notation was confirmed as structurally sound. Leonardo was an accomplished musician, as well as a painter, and the theory has never been definitively disproved. It's also really never been confirmed. What has been confirmed by scientific analysis, though, is that the figure seated immediately to Jesus' right, the disciple traditionally identified as John, has been the subject of sustained argument ever since Dan Brown brought it to mass attention. The figure has long hair, a soft face, and no beard, which some scholars and many popular writers have argued is evidence that the figure is actually Mary Magdalene. Most mainstream art historians, though, disagree. Leonardo did consistently paint young male figures with similar soft features, and the historical record identifying the figure as John the Apostle is clear. The argument does persist, anyway. Infrared analysis has revealed something less contested, though. The painting contains a significantly earlier composition beneath the visible surface. Leonardo changed the position of multiple apostles during the painting process, adjusting their gestures and expressions as he worked. In one earlier layer, Jesus' right hand was positioned differently, the face of Judas, which Leonardo famously labored over longest, reportedly wandering the streets of Milan for months, searching for a face villainous enough to serve as a reference, was also repositioned from an earlier draft. The painting is not on canvas, it's painted directly onto a plaster wall of a Milan refectory, using a technique Leonardo invented himself, combining oil and tempera on dry plaster, rather than the standard fresco method of painting into wet plaster. The technique failed within his own lifetime, the painting began deteriorating before he was dead. 5. Bacchus – Caravaggio, 1597 In the foreground of Caravaggio's Bacchus, sitting on a stone ledge in front of the god of wine, is a glass carafe filled with a dark red liquid. It is a masterclass in painted light, Caravaggio studied the way light refracts through glass and liquid, and this carafe shows it. But in 2009, when researchers from an Italian conservation institute applied multispectral infrared reflectography to the painting, a technique that allows scientists to see through layers of grime and varnish that are invisible to the eye, they found something else in the carafe. A man, tiny, tucked into the reflected light playing on the surface of the wine, is a figure with dark curly hair, a collar around his neck, and a paintbrush in his hand, working at an easel. It is almost certainly a self-portrait of Caravaggio himself, placed inside his own painting in a reflection too small to see without technology. This discovery was not entirely without precedent, an Italian restorer had noticed something in the same spot when cleaning the painting in 1922, but the tools available to him didn't allow for a clear analysis, and the image gradually darkened and then disappeared back into invisibility, and subsequent restoration efforts obscured it further. It remained effectively lost for nearly 90 years before infrared analysis recovered it. The figure does match known likenesses of Caravaggio at around 25, the age he would have been when the painting was made, closely enough that the identification is accepted, though not universally confirmed. What makes it stranger, though, is that Caravaggio had already painted himself elsewhere in the composition in a less hidden way. The young man posing as Bacchus is believed to be his friend Mario Menitti, but earlier in his career Caravaggio painted another version of the subject, Sic Bacchus, now in the Borghese Gallery in Rome, in which the god is clearly Caravaggio himself, haggard and unwell. The Uffizi Bacchus, the more famous version, appears to contain him again, this time compressed to the size of a thumbnail, watching himself be replaced by a younger, healthier model. 4. The Night Watch Rembrandt 1642 The Night Watch is not the painting Rembrandt made. What hangs in a museum in Amsterdam, enormous the size of a wall commanding its own room, is a version of the painting that was cut down in 1715 when someone needed to move it through a narrower doorway in Amsterdam's town hall and decided the simplest solution was just scissors. Strips were removed from all four sides, 60 centimeters came off the left edge alone. Two militiamen and a child standing on a bridge disappeared entirely from the composition, the removed sections were never recovered, and for 300 years nobody knew exactly what had been lost. A small copy of the original full painting had been made around 1655 by a Dutch painter named Gerrit Lundens, probably on commission from the militia captain, who had paid for the original. The Lundens copy, held by the National Gallery in London and on loan to the Rijksmuseum, is about 1-20th the size of the original and was not painted with anything like Rembrandt's precision, but it shows the full composition before the cutting. What it revealed when researchers studied it carefully enough was that the cropping had fundamentally changed the painting's dynamic. In the version everyone knows, Captain Bannekoek and his lieutenant stand more or less in the center. In the original, they were off-center, positioned to the right of the frame, leading their company towards an empty space to the left, creating a sense of movement of troops actually marching somewhere. The cut removed the destination and left a painting that looks composed but had originally looked urgent. In 2021, the Rijksmuseum used artificial intelligence trained on the existing painting's colors, brushstrokes, and technique to reconstruct the missing panels from the Lundens copy. Printed onto canvas and mounted at the painting's edges, the reconstructed sections were displayed alongside the original for several months, showing the complete composition for the first time in three centuries. The fragments cut away in 1715 have never been found, and the director of the museum says he still hopes someone will call about them. 3. The Creation of Adam, Michelangelo, 1512 The most-viewed painting in the world, seen by millions of visitors every year lying on their backs in the Sistine Chapel looking up at the ceiling, contains a secret that was hidden for nearly 500 years and only discovered when a physician happened to notice something strange about the shape of the cloak surrounding God. In 1990, a doctor named Franklin Meshberger published a paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association arguing that the reddish-pink shroud enclosing God and his angels in the creation of Adam was not an artistic invention. It was an anatomically accurate cross-section of the human brain. Every detail matched. The cerebral cortex formed the outer edge of the cloak, a fold in the fabric corresponded to the Sylvian Fisher, an angel's knee fell precisely where the optic chiasm sits, and the back of the angel below God traced the shape of the pons. The composition of the entire group, God extending his finger toward Adam surrounded by angels with that billowing shape, sits inside a medically-precise rendering of the organ that generates our thoughts. Michelangelo had spent years studying anatomy through illicit dissection of human corpses at a Florentine convent beginning when he was 17 years old. He was so thorough that he burned all his anatomical notes and sketches to conceal the extent of his activities from the church. Knowing that human dissection remained controversial even after Pope Sixtus IV had permitted limited educational use. The argument Meshberger made, and that subsequent researchers have extended, is that this knowledge wasn't incidental to the creation of Adam, it was central to its meaning. Michelangelo was not illustrating God giving life to a man, he was illustrating God giving intelligence, the vehicle through which that gift travels the brain. The brain is the gift, and the brain is what surrounds God as he delivers it. Whether this was deliberate protest, or private affirmation, or something in between the two has never been established, Michelangelo left no notes. The paintings are silent, but the brain is unmistakably there, drawn in pink and red by the same hands that built the Pietà, hiding in plain sight above the altar of the most powerful institution in the world, waiting for the right pair of medical eyes. What gives the theory its force is not just the visual correspondence, although the visual correspondence is pretty striking, given that this has been confirmed by multiple independent researchers. Michelangelo was a man of faith and simultaneously a man who devoted enormous energy to understanding the human body through means that the church found problematic. He believed, he said, that the mastery of anatomy was the foundation of all great art. He spent years acquiring the knowledge that he then destroyed the evidence of, which itself is a kind of commentary on the relationship between knowledge and authority. The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel was painted under conditions of severe constraint. The Pope insisted on certain subjects, certain scales, and certain positions, and Michelangelo fought every step of the way for more freedom. The brain, hidden in God's cloak, can be read a statement that human intelligence, not institutional authority, is the true vehicle of the divine. There's also something worth noting about the finger. In the most famous detail of the entire ceiling, the gap between God's finger and Adam's, the almost touch that's been reproduced on everything from coffee mugs to cinema posters for five centuries, if you accept the brain theory, the finger delivering the spark of life is extending from inside the human brain. The implication is not that God is creating life, it's that consciousness itself, the brain, human thought, the capacity to reason, is the thing reaching towards humanity. Not divine fiat from a cloud, but intellect meeting intellect across an infinitely small gap. Michelangelo, painting in 1512, hiding his message inside the ceiling of a Vatican chapel while the Pope shouted to him from below, appears to have been making one of the most radical statements in the history of Western art, and he painted it right above the altar, in the most prominent possible position, confident that nobody would see it for at least 500 years. 2. Girl with a Pearl Earring – Vermeer, 1665 She's got no eyebrows, she's got no background, she's got no name. She's been staring over her shoulder at us for 360 years, and nobody can agree on who the hell she is, what she's wearing, or whether the earring that made her famous is even a pearl. The painting was purchased at a Dutch auction in 1881 for 2 guilders and 30 cents, roughly the equivalent of about 20 euros today. The buyer, a Dutch civil servant named Arnoldus de Toom, spotted it among a batch of damaged canvases before being sold for almost nothing. The painting was in poor condition, it was darkened with grime, its color is invisible. He had cleaned it, and underneath the dirt was one of the most extraordinary paintings in the history of art. He bequeathed it to somebody at The Hague in 1902, where it's remained ever since, and for most of the century that followed, it was known as the Girl with the Turban. The earring wasn't considered the focus of the painting until about the 1990s. In 2018, an international team of conservation scientists removed the painting from its frame for the first time in decades, and spent two weeks examining it in a specially constructed glass laboratory that was open to the public. The result? Dismantled several assumptions that had accumulated around the painting for generations. Most visibly, the background isn't black. Vermeer painted the girl in front of a dark green curtain, probably a linen cloth hung behind the sitter to isolate her against the plain background he preferred. The green pigment made from copper compounds had changed chemically over the centuries and become transparent, leaving what appeared to be a void. Under imaging technology, though, the folds of the curtain were recoverable in the upper right corner. The black background that viewers had been responding to for three centuries was not what Vermeer painted. Also recovered under this analysis, the girl has eyelashes, delicate, almost invisible, rendered in a single thin layer of dark paint that's faded to invisibility over time. The absence of eyebrows, though, which has led some scholars to argue that Vermeer was painting an idealized or abstract face, turns out to be less significant than the presence of eyelashes and simply become too faint to see. The imaging shows that Vermeer revised the composition multiple times during the painting, shifting the position of her ear, the back of her neck, the top of her headscarf. She's not a person who sat still and was recorded in a moment. She's someone Vermeer built, adjusted, and then rebuilt until the image was right. Now, the earring itself is still unsolved. Pearls of that size depicted would have been extraordinarily expensive in 17th century Delft, far beyond what Vermeer, who died in debt with 11 children, could have afforded. Scholars have argued that it was a glass imitation. Venetian glass manufacturers produced convincing fake pearls, or a polished tin disc, or that it wasn't an earring at all but a spot of light that Vermeer included as a compositional device, not attached to the girl's ear. Under analysis, though, the earring has no visible hook and no earlobe is definitively shown behind it. The blue fabric of her turban was painted in ultramarine ground from lapis lazuli, a pigment more expensive than gold in the 17th century, and the red on her lips came from insects in Mexico and South America, traded through the Dutch East India Company's global network. His pigments were assembled from across the known world. And still, nobody knows who she is. The researcher's team director said after two years of work that they had not come any closer to identifying her. She's not a portrait in the formal sense. She's a tronie, a painting of an invented type or a character rather than a specific identifiable individual. She may be Vermeer's daughter, Maria, who was around 12 at the time and who some scholars believe also worked as his assistant. She may be his patron's daughter. She may be no one, though, a face Vermeer assembled from observation and imagination. But what makes the girl with the pearl earring remarkable as an object of attention is precisely the absence of answers. She was unknown for two centuries, bought almost for nothing, restored from obscurity, and has since become one of the most recognized faces in the history of art. The 1995 novel that fictionalized her story sold 5 million copies. The 2003 film made Scarlett Johansson a star. A 10 billion pixel digital scan published allows anyone in the world to zoom into any brush stroke at the highest available resolution. And she still hasn't told us her name yet or who she was or what hangs from her ear, cost a fortune, or was made of glass. Vermeer himself is barely less mysterious than the subject. He made only around 36 surviving paintings, working slowly, and he died in 1675 at the age of 43. After his death, he was essentially forgotten for nearly 200 years. The painting that would eventually make him one of the most celebrated artists in the world was sold at auction for the equivalent of pocket change. The earring she wears, the fabric she's dressed in, the green curtain behind her that nobody could see, all of it sat in the dark for two centuries waiting for someone to look closely enough. She looks over her shoulder and as she doesn't explain anything. 1. The Starry Night Vincent van Gogh 1889 Vincent van Gogh painted The Starry Night in June of 1889. He was 36 years old, voluntarily committed to an asylum and recovering from the episode in which he had mutilated his own ear six months earlier. He was not allowed to paint at night. Patients were confined after dark, and so the painting wasn't made from direct observation but from memory reconstructed during daylight hours from an east-facing window that he had painted 21 times since his arrival, in every kind of weather and light. The village in the foreground is not Saint-Rémy. It is imaginary, assembled from his memories of the Dutch villages of his childhood, transplanted to Provence. The cypress in the left foreground is real, a motif he returned to repeatedly in his Saint-Rémy work, associating it with eternity and mourning. The swirling sky, though, is entirely his own. He described the painting in a letter to his brother Theo as a failure. He preferred his wheat fields. 2. Turbulence It's one of the most mathematically complex phenomena in physics. The equations that govern fluid motion, or the Navier-Stokes equations, are so difficult to solve in turbulent conditions that Clay Mathematics Institute has offered a million-dollar prize to anyone who can prove whether they always have solutions. A Russian mathematician named Andrei Kolmogorov developed the most influential description of turbulence in 1941, describing how energy cascades from large swirling structures to smaller ones in a specific statistical pattern, a law now fundamental to the study of atmospheric physics. In 2004, scientists using the Hubble Space Telescope observed the eddies of a distinct cloud of dust and gas around a dying star, and noted that they looked like starry night. The observation prompted a team of physicists from Mexico and Spain to analyze the luminance, the variation, and brightness across the surface of Van Gogh's swirling sky. What they found was published in the Journal of Physics and Fluids, and immediately attracted global attention. The 14 visible swirls and eddies in the starry night, varying in diameter from about 4 to 27 centimeters, follow the statistical law of turbulence with an amazing precision. The sizes of the swirls, their relative distances from each other, and the distribution of their intensity all match the mathematical patterns that describe real turbulent flow. The brushstrokes that produce the swirls are themselves turbulent. The paint, a high-viscosity mixture of linseed oil and pigment, shows turbulent behavior in the mixing of its colors at a microscopic level. But what makes the discovery more than just a statistical curiosity is the specificity of this match. The researchers noted that other paintings of the same period that looked equally turbulent to the eye, including Edvard Munch's The Scream, which has a dramatic swirling sky, don't show the same mathematical correspondence. The pattern in starry night's not a product of swirly-looking brushwork in general. It appears in Van Gogh's work specifically, and specifically in the paintings made during his periods of acute psychological crisis. His self-portrait from a calmer period shows no such pattern. Paintings from 1890, made in the months before his death, show it again. The most likely explanation is that Van Gogh, who spent long hours at his window staring at the sky—he wrote in letters about watching the clouds and the stars for extended periods, particularly during nights when he couldn't sleep—had trained his perception to see the actual structure of atmospheric motion, the cascading, nested quality of turbulent flow. He wasn't calculating mathematics, he was painting what he saw, with an accuracy that science would not have the tools to formalize for another half-century. Van Gogh sent the painting to Theo with a letter calling it unsatisfying. He died 14 months later in July of 1890 from a gunshot wound whose full circumstances really haven't been definitively established. The Starry Night entered the collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1941, the same year Kamogorov published the mathematics that described what Van Gogh had already painted. It remains the only major work of art that's simultaneously a masterpiece, a psychiatric document, a window out of an asylum, and an accurate representation of one of the hardest unsolved problems in physics. Researchers also noted that when Van Gogh painted during periods of relative calm, when his mental state was more stable, when the crises had passed, his brushwork didn't show the same correspondence with turbulent mathematics. Whether this was a consequence of his illness or the extreme sensitivity that accompanied it, or simply the number of hours he spent at his window with nothing to do but look at the sky, researchers can't say. The painting, though, keeps the answers, like everything else, to itself.