7 Famous Works of Art With Bizarre Mistakes You Can't Unsee

No one should be immune from criticism. Not even the great masters of the art world--they're humans just like the rest of us. So please indulge us while we take a look at lauded works of genius created by artists far, far more talented than we are, and laugh at them.

By the Cracked.com method of dating, the large Romanesque cross of Sand Damiano was made about four centuries before the events of Assassin's Creed 2. It is famous for being the cross that Saint Francis of Assisi prayed to before receiving his miraculous vision to reform the Roman Catholic Church.

Also, for inadvertently featuring a giant dong on the holiest figure in the Western world.

The Screw-Up:

We should clarify: Since the San Damiano cross has become a standard for religious icons, its style has been reproduced for centuries. However, it was not until a few years ago at a church in Warr Acres, Oklahoma that somebody had looked at their reproduction and had one of those "once you see it, you can't unsee it" moments when looking at Christ's abdomen.

Take that, Satanism!

They actually forced the artist to re-paint it so it wouldn't look so much like a giant, cartoonish boner. But here's the thing; if you scroll up you'll find it's now impossible to not see a boner on the original.

Either this "unknown" artist from 12th century Umbria knew nothing about how abs work, or he played one of the greatest and most long-running pranks in the history of art.

People who know absolutely nothing about art can usually spot a Normal Rockwell painting from a mile away (it helps that they hang in the waiting rooms of dentists all around the globe). Rockwell was a machine; he created over 4,000 paintings, most in that distinctive, heartwarming style of old-timey Americans doing wholesome things.

His work for The Saturday Evening Post is a prime example of this. Every two weeks the man had to paint a new cover that, you know, perfectly captured the American spirit for that moment even better than the last issue. His classic People Reading Stock Exchange, featuring four people leaning over posted stock quotes, was one such cover. The only one, perhaps, featuring a grotesque deformity.

The Screw-Up:

The kid in the red shirt has three legs. Two with their knees locked, an apparent third with the knee bent so that he can rest his hand on it:

We smell another dick joke coming.

This was a source of particular embarrassment for Rockwell, who only noticed years later that he had, "...sort of put three legs on the boy." As for how this mysterious third legs comes off within the context of the painting, Rockwell biographer Richard Halpern described the addition as "an inexplicable phallic supplement."

His dick joke, not ours. Wait, is this whole article going to be about finding secret dicks in old paintings?

Why keep a good dick secret, that's what we want to know.

Yes, that's supposed to be a woman. Michelangelo was one of the greatest geniuses in the history of our species, but we're not afraid to call him out on this: We have never met a woman who looked like that. Well, not while we were sober. But wait until you see one of them naked--it gets worse.

Bulky muscles, weird boobs and other stuff that wouldn't pass the sniff test in your local gym's ladies locker room.

The Screw-Up:

Michelangelo used bodybuilders as his models for women in all his artwork. Naturally, this made dresses and breasts even more important for his subjects since they were essentially the only things keeping his work from featuring all-male casts. Of course, sometimes their backs were turned ...

And sometimes he gave them the most ridiculously botched boob-jobs in the history of art. Behold:

Here's more terrifying boobage in The Last Judgment, as seen in the Sistine Chapel:

By the way, there seems to be some confusion over whether or not the two naked dudes to the right are actually supposed to be Adam and Eve. The one on the left... sort of has the head of a woman. But she's missing the ridiculous glued-on boobs, so make of that what you will.

You be the judge. We'll just be quietly disturbed.

Those are not depictions of Satan up there. They're supposed to be Moses, of The Ten Commandments fame. But that's just a small sampling of the painting and sculptures that seem to portray Moses as part bull.

What the hell?

In fairness, we might be able to chalk this one up to hair gel.

The Screw-Up:

One of the funny things about the Bible is that even if it is the real-deal word of God, it doesn't change the fact that we probably ruined it forever the minute we decided to write it down. Languages are extremely limited, and words like "virgin," "cock" and "ass" fail to translate as well as we would like into the common tongue. Likewise, those "horns" Moses apparently purchased from a dollar store on Mount Horeb exist solely because Saint Jerome "rather clumsily" translated the Hebrew Bible into Latin for his immensely popular Vulgate Bible.

"The Horny Bible."

This innocent mistranslation of "hornlike rays [of light]" into "horns, just like the freaking Devil" caused a tsunami of artistic screw-ups that spilled well into the next 1,000 years.

Perhaps the most famous instance of this image is Michelangelo's Moses from tomb of Pope Julius II, which is so iconic that it seriously led to Charleston Heston being cast as Moses in The Ten Commandments. Minus the horns, of course:

From my cold, marble hands.

However, it is also worth noting that at this point Michelangelo had caught on to the Vulgate Bible's mistranslation, that Moses did not have horns and--perhaps most importantly--that Pope Julius II was a douchebag. As such, good ol' Mike became one of the first artists we know about to deliberately reinforce this error, not to preserve the artistic style, but simply because he knew his sculpture would decorate the tomb of a Pope who really was that big an asshole.

The jokes on you, Pope Dickweed. Oh, and on generations of artists and scholars.