7 Bizarre Easter Eggs Hidden in Great Works of Art

The School of Athens by Raffaello is perhaps the single most iconic image of the High Renaissance that is also the cover of Use Your Illusion I and II.

The Easter Egg:

While we could spend all day talking about the cameos Raphael slipped into the fresco ...

... they're nothing compared to the Easter Egg Renaissance master Donato Bramante contributed to the project. According to Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, Raphael had Bramante design "the architecture" for the fresco and, sure enough, Bramante's contribution was a carbon copy of the floor plans for the new St. Peter's Basilica he was working on just down the street. The School of Athens wound up offering a ground-level glimpse at the completed work more than a century before it would be finished.

Bramante already had the enormous cathedral completed in his head, and thanks to Raphael he was able to slip a sneak peak of the structure within the fresco, just like a Renaissance Pixar film. Well, if Pixar was slipping in references to movies that wouldn't be released until 2126, that is. We just feel bad for all the hardcore church fans out there who caught the teaser and got super stoked for this new blockbuster cathedral, only to see the release date and realize they'd be passing on those pre-ordered tickets to their grandkids.

It was basically Duke Nukem Forever: The Church.

Al Hirschfeld was an American illustrator and caricaturist best known for his black-and-white portraits of celebrities and political figures all throughout the 20th century. Think of those '80s posters in Asian hair salons, but, y'know, classy:

The Easter Egg:

Hirschfeld also managed to hide his daughter Nina's name in damn near every single one of his thousands of artworks.

Hirschfeld decided to push this concept to a level he later described as "harmless insanity." And while we agree with the "insanity," we don't know about that "harmless" part: Presumably his other daughter, Xernophystoles Mernozence Hirschfeld, felt a little hurt and neglected when her name turned up conspicuously absent ...

The man became so adept and prolific that the Pentagon eventually approved a $60,000 grant to train the eyes of bomber pilots by having them spot the "hidden Ninas" in Hirschfeld's drawings.

But betwixt all the booty and David Lynch fan art, Pieter was still a classically trained artist. The Magpie on the Gallows, for example, is a spectacular example of one of his landscapes. Look at it: Serene. Pastoral. Beautiful.

The Easter Egg:

All that lush foliage and subtle color work make it so easy to overlook the man in the bottom-left corner shitting his guts out in the bushes.

Yeah ... Bruegel didn't really know how to stop painting asses and the things that come out of asses. Take The Fair at Hoboken for example:

He had his own artistic reasons for this obsession, of course: In many of his works, defecation was used to showcase "the worst excesses of human folly."

But somewhere around the time you find yourself spending days painstakingly rendering a diarrhea waterfall, you have to stop and consider that this whole "human folly" thing might just be the spin you're putting on the fact that you're "really into poop these days."

The Easter Egg:

The whole place is chock-full of weird shenanigans: There's a chunk of moon rock set into one window, it boasts a fantastic boss of The Three Stooges and it is the only place of worship to contain a gargoyle of Darth Vader on its holy grounds.

In the 1980s, the Cathedral held a contest in National Geographic's World magazine to design a grotesque for the sacred sanctum; the crazier the better. Among the competition's winners was third-place Christopher Rader, who, we should stress, was absolutely not the hastily constructed childish alias of Darth Vader.

Don't take our word for it; just listen to Christopher's close personal friend, Tarth Bader, who went on the record as saying, "Chris Rader is totally not me. Him! Totally not ... him, that other guy. That handsome, dangerous fellow with the smashing black cape. That's not Chris. Chris is just another harmless little boy. For all you know ..."

The Papal Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi is the proud home to some of the most famous frescoes of the Renaissance. The works of Trecento master Giotto are featured prominently throughout the Upper Church. Sadly, some of those works were severely damaged in a recent earthquake. Such sacrilege could only be the work of the devil ...

The Easter Egg:

... who was probably just trying to escape from his prison inside Giotto's painting. A team of restorers working on the church following the 1997 earthquakes found some light structural damage, a few faded spots and -- oh yeah -- the devil's face hidden in the clouds of this supposedly holy work.

The Easter Egg:

There are actually four people in this portrait, and no, they're not all hiding under the man's bitchin' archaic pimp cap. Look very, very closely at that convex mirror, way in the back ...

Van Eyck actually painted the entire painting itself -- including the couple, whose POV we're apparently sharing -- backward and in fisheye inside of a tiny, almost unnoticeable piece of the background. Nobody knows for sure who the two extra figures are supposed to be, though some say the signature above the mirror means that one is Van Eyck himself. But that seems far too tame an explanation for such an impossibly crazy feat. Our leading theory? That's either Amy and the Doctor, or Scott Bakula and Robocop.

Jacopo della Quercia is the proud author of "Go @#$% Yourself!" -- An Ungentlemanly Disagreement, by Filippo Argenti and "The Sound of Laughter" in Wordplague's The Four Humors. He asks that you check out the latter since, unlike Killing Lincoln by Bill O'Reilly, the Ford's Theatre National Historic Site actually requested a copy of the book.

For more interesting Easter eggs, check out 7 Creepy Video Game Easter Eggs You'll Wish Were Never Found and 7 Insane Easter Eggs Hidden in Movies and TV Shows.

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