Why do famous artists add flies to their perfect paintings?

The flies appearing in paintings imply decay and death, but sometimes it is just a joke of the famous painters.

Since the Middle Ages, flies have appeared in art to symbolize death or the decay of the body and soul. In Renaissance portraits, the presence of flies symbolized the brevity of human existence. The artists wanted to convey the idea that in the universe, our lives are no longer than those of insects.

" Portrait of a Woman in the Hofer Family" with a fly on the subject's scarf.

One of the most famous paintings with flies is the Portrait of a Lady of the Hofer Family, painted around 1470 and housed in the British National Gallery. The fly lands on the figure's pure white veil, suggesting that our lives, like the girl in the painting, are impermanent. Therefore, we must make the best of the time we have.

Speaking of time and eternity, the painter and poet William Blake wrote:

It's not me

A fly like you?

Or are you not?

A man like me?

Sometimes artists would paint a fly to attract attention , using a trompe-l'oeil technique. They would paint the fly so realistically that the viewer of the portrait would want to shoo it away. The Italian painter Giorgio Vasari, a biographer of Renaissance artists, recounted that Giotto pranked his teacher Cimabue by adding a realistic-looking fly to his painting.

Salvador Dalí was called the "Lord of the Flies" because he painted this insect so much. In his famous painting Persistent Memory, he painted a fly sitting on the face of a clock. The painting is currently kept at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (USA). The Spanish artist also used a colony of ants to represent the passing of time and the impermanence of life.

Entomologist Ron Cherry once made a connection between flies and death. Renaissance thought tended to mix allegory. Flies were seen as representing supernatural forces, mostly associated with evil and corruption, since they lived on rotten fruit and decaying organic matter. Flies were seen as harbingers of bad things like disease and death.

Here are some pictures that feature flies:

Artist Petrus Christus painted a fly sitting on a ledge in front of the figure. The painting is on display at the Metropolitan Museum in New York (USA).

In Carlo Crivelli's painting, a fly perched on a ledge attracts the figure's attention.

Works by Verena Vickers (left) and Carlo Crivelli (right) with flies on hats and walls.

A fly lands on a clock in Salvador Dalí's "Persistent Memory."