According to this news story, there’s a devil hidden in the clouds of a painting by Giotto.
I clicked on the picture that contains a close-up photo of the cloud, but can’t see the devil in it. Can someone point it out?
It’s a face in profile, looking upwards and to the right - at the angel’s nads.
Pareidolia, I’d say.
It’s more apparent HERE.
Although I tend to agree with njtt.
I dunno about that, because the cloud is not random: it’s a human creation. He would have been working at that part of the cloud for hours, if not days. And when you do see the face, it’s extremely distinct.
However I think calling it a devil is stretching it a bit - given the hooked nose, I suspect it could be the artist’s self-portrait.
Yeah, I don’t think this would be printed at all if it weren’t for the seductive lure of the opportunity to write “Devil found in detail…”
We are so hard-wired to “recognize” faces that we can easily discern them (and project emotions onto them)when it’s absolutely clear that the chiaroscuro in question is a produced without intent and that the “face” is an incidental appearance of natural forces.
With this, if you squint hard enough you might eventually get a general idea of where someone might be able to imagine a face, but more than anything it resembles a patch of cloud.
It’s buon fresco, so probably minutes up to an hour.
I think it’s a set of highlights and shading mixed with some incidental marks/stain/water damage/etc, especially that close to the edge of that giornata (the ‘day’ of fresco plaster applied-- you can see the borders between them in most frescos of that time period). No, the paint isn’t applied accidentally, but that doesn’t mean that was meant to represent a face. Why is it read as a ‘devil’, of all things?
I’m going to continue to disagree with this opinion. If you look at the edges of the cloud in the detail, they’re wispy and smudged, except the edges round the ‘face’, which are much more distinct. In particular, the part that makes up the lips very deliberately hard-edged.
Did you look at the link in post #4? The face is pretty apparent in there. And as has been said, it’s not like this is a natural cloud formation or a over cooked Dorito, it’s man made. Every single brush struck was done on purpose.
That’s rather a naive assertion - rendering clouds is a necessarily stochastic process.
The “face” doesn’t resemble a face in the style of the artist, it resembles the sort of face that we “see” with the aid of the shortcuts wired into our brains which help us to pick faces out of a complex scene. Like this one, which you will hereafter not be able to unsee, now that you’ve been “helped” to see it.
In painting clouds, the artist is going to blot down some rough shapes and then add shading and highlights relatively haphazardly - this is necessarily going to produce the exact same sort of field that lends itself so well to pareidolia in reality.
I honestly don’t see anything where you’ve circled, but if you don’t see a face in that picture…lips, chin, a nose, nostril ridges, a shadow cast from light isn’t hitting the inside of the nose, cheek bones, eyebrow ridges, big forehead…I have to assume you’re either lying or deliberately trying not to see it.
I take that back, looking closer at the area where you circled, I can see a faint hint of lips and eyes. Perhaps that was on purpose as well. If you can pick that out of the clouds and still not see the big giant one below it that has the internet abuzz…I’m not sure what else to say. I could go either way on the small one you cirlcled, but the big one looks, to me, like it was put there very much on purpose.
True, and artists have been known to slip secrets into their art. But there are some serious problems if you look closely.
The “horns” are obviously part of the shading of the clouds, leaving us with just a face, no devil.
The “sly smile” referred to in the original link is practically a straight line and looks like a child’s rendition of a mouth rather than something an accomplished artist might do.
The eye suffers from the same issues. It’s not an artistic rendition of an eye, it’s just a straight line where one might imagine the eye should be.
The chin is really just a blob of cotton ball white. (If it was a self-portrait, the artist needed to look at his weak chin a lot more realistically!) The nose catches the eye–as it were–but I suspect that a different angle would destroy the illusion.
Take away the horns, you take away the devil; take away the devil and all you have left is a face seen in a cloud. Just because the painting was made purposefully doesn’t mean that people won’t see what they want in it.
Oh my god, it’s Beavis!
FTR, I’ve only called it a ‘face’ I never said any of those things. In fact, I never noticed horns (and still don’t see it) and haven’t read anything that mentioned a ‘sly smile’ though when I first looked at it I did notice a ‘smirk’ but I didn’t mention it in anything I said here.
But if we wanted to call it a devil, couldn’t the ‘cotton ball white’ on the chin look like a goatee which I know I’ve seen in some drawings of the devil. Also, there’s a splotch that looks reminiscent of pointy ears. But, I’ll still go on record as saying I’ve only ever said that I see a face and I’ve never called it a ‘devil’. I really don’t know enough about the church, St Francis or the artist to know if the devil would be relevant or even a clever joke so I have no idea if it would make sense here.
OMG! That is scary!
A ‘benign’ tumor? I don’t think so.
I can easily discern it - but I don’t see anything there to suggest it is anything apart from accident, and see fewer details which add up to “face” than in the adjacent bit that I circled. (As the “devil” is in strict profile we don’t need symmetry to allow us to see it.)
The thing is, the details that you enumerate are not actually there in the photo. We can “see” them with the aid of a handy little “sub-circuit” in our brain that fills in that picks “faces” out of everything and reduces them to a sort of shorthand which makes it possible to quickly discern one person from another.
For instance, if I direct your attention back to the adjacent area, and this time take care to make sure that you are looking at the same "eyes"that I am, and then ask you to look at the same spot back here, areas which might be interpreted as elements in a face will be reinforced as such. You should have no trouble making out a nose, individually-defined lips, a chin, the overall shape of a head, and you will likely even be able to attribute mood to it.
But that’s not because it is objectively there - it’s because we’re programmed to do that. We have facial recognition software built in, and it doesn’t take much to add up to “face,” when you feed it a random input. When you look at any of the elements of the “faces” in isolation, the illusion is broken.
The part you’ve circled is definitely pareidolia, I’d say. It’s clearly happenstance blotches that happen to be somewhat in the shape of a face. The mouth is part of a longer brushstroke, and the overall “face” is misshapen.
The profile is far less so:
- The strokes do not match the rest of the cloud, particularly the two straight lines that form the eyes and mouth.
- The lines and shading of the cheek go against the rest of the brush strokes.
- The edges of the forehead and chin are clearly defined, as opposed to the rest of the edge of the cloud. I could buy that they are intended to be the edges of the cloud, perhaps, but then the peak of the nose goes against the general roundedness.
It’s possible that the face in profile was an accident, and I see no reason to believe it’s a devil or anything that specific, but it certainly looks intentional.
I didn’t mean to put words in your mouth. I was referring to the link and not to anything you or anyone in this thread mentioned.
from Crafter_Man’s link:
By someone restoring the painting.
This. If it was drawn on purpose, it wouldn’t strike us as a face, it would look like a particular person, with eyes, irises, eyelashes, wrinkles, etc. Giotto was a better artist than what we’re seeing.