Belgian surrealist artist Rene Magritte said, “Art evokes a mystery without which the world could not exist.”
What does Gioconda’s smile hide? Is it true that Leonardo da Vinci encrypted the melody and even the location of the Holy Grail in his fresco “The Last Supper”? Is Claude Monet’s painting “Water Lilies, Clouds” inexplicably causing fires in the house? Was Hieronymus Bosch, author of The Garden of Earthly Delights, a believer or a heretic?
All these questions continue to attract the attention of art critics and beauty experts. Each painting has its own history and reputation. Some are believed to heal, while others, on the contrary, bring misfortune.
Some works of art have managed to acquire terrible legends that continue to haunt people’s minds. These are the things we’ll talk about.
“Stagecoach” by Laura P.
This painting was created from a photograph by artist Laura P. Moreover, the author of the photo, James Kidd, assured that there was no one behind the stagecoach. The silhouette emerged during the development of the photo.
When the artist hung the painting in the office, his colleagues demanded that the painting be removed on the grounds that it was possessed by a ghost. Allegedly, evil began to happen in the room, and no matter how it was corrected, the canvas itself always hung crookedly. The owners of the painting below also complained about the ghost. As a result, the unfortunate canvas was set on fire.
“Rain Woman”, Svetlana Taurus
In 1996, Vinnitsa artist Svetlana Telets said she painted a strange portrait of a woman in a black hat in a cafe when she thought someone was watching her. It was as if something invisible was guiding his hand. The artist, who exhibited his works in an art hall, stated that visitors also shared the feeling that the girl in the portrait was watching them. Shortly thereafter, a woman bought the painting and apparently hung it in her room. Two weeks later, the buyer came to the artist at midnight to buy the painting, because the sight of the stranger in the portrait disturbed him everywhere.
Soon the story repeated: the young man refused to take the money back and brought back the painting as well. He said that the woman in the portrait saw him in his dreams every night and that she looked at him with white-iris eyes and drove him crazy. When the fame of the painting became known, one of the buyers said that the woman’s sinister face seemed cute to him, but he later brought the painting back, claiming that he began to suffer from terrible headaches. The artist admitted that he believed that the soul of a stranger was looking for someone and, perhaps, when he found his owner, he would calm down.
“The Crying Child” by Bruno Amadio
Working under the pseudonym Giovanni Bragolin, Bruno Amadio became famous for his infamous series of paintings of crying children, in which he painted 65 orphans. The most famous of these was “The Crying Child”. According to legend, the author used his own son as a model, whom he forced to cry in pain by lighting a match in front of his eyes. Two weeks after the painting was completed, my son developed a fever and “burned out” in just a few days. Meanwhile, the artist himself was burned alive in his workshop. The cause of the fire could not be determined.
It was said that the child was actually an orphan that Bruno took in to raise him. The local priest called him “the devil’s child” because his adoptive parents all died under strange circumstances. If this version is to be believed, perhaps his soul took refuge in the painting. It is no coincidence that all owners of the canvas suffered from fires in one way or another. What was especially striking was that although all the items were burned, only the painting was not affected by the fire. This pattern was noticed by firefighter Peter Hull and subsequently by Alan Wilkinson at The Sun. After the story appeared in the newspaper, reproductions of the painting had to be withdrawn from sale as editors were inundated with letters from buyers containing stories about the fires.
Mirrored Venus by Diego Velazquez
There are many mysteries in Velazquez’s painting “Venus with a Mirror”. For example, art historians are confused as to why the goddess in the reflection is depicted as elderly. So why did the author use the wrong point of view? Meanwhile, the owners of the painting tried to get rid of it, believing that it brought misfortune: destruction, robbery and fires.
At the beginning of the 20th century the canvas was stored in the National Gallery in London. However, in 1914, a women’s rights activist attacked the painting with an ax and tortured Venus’s beautiful body.
“Dead Mother” by Edvard Munch
Edvard Munch, the author of the book “The Scream”, has another mysterious painting called “Dead Mother”, which tells about all the horror that a child experiences when faced with death. The Norwegian artist lost his mother and sisters at the age of 5 – they died of tuberculosis. The boy was raised by his father, a religious fanatic. Against the background of these events, he almost went crazy.
The owners of the painting admitted that they too lost their minds while looking at the painting. They claimed that the child’s eyes were following them and that the sheets on the mother’s bed were moving. And sometimes the girl suddenly left the picture.
“Hands Resist Him” by Bill Stoneham
According to the artist, he painted the painting in 1972, inspired by his childhood photograph. True, it turned out much scarier than the original. If the painting was taken of him and his little sister in front of their home, the canvas shows a five-year-old boy standing next to a life-size, eyeless baby girl with her hands outstretched behind him in a store window. We came out of darkness to them. At the same time, the characters’ features resemble plastic masks. According to Bill Stoneham, the doll is the child’s guide to the world of imagination. But not the very good ones.
The reputation of this picture is also scary. When the painting was exhibited at the Feingarten Gallery in Beverly Hills, it was purchased by actor John Marley, who played Jack Waltz in the movie The Godfather. Unexpectedly, three people died within a year: the art critic Seldis, the gallerist Feingarten, and the actor Marley himself. After that, the painting mysteriously disappeared and was only discovered in 2000 in a former brewery in California, where a married couple took it for themselves. They put it up for sale almost immediately and claimed that the painting was cursed because a ghost appeared inside it. According to the testimony of their four-year-old daughter, the children came out of their paintings at night and started fighting.
Let’s be friends?
Source: People Talk
Mary Crossley is an author at “The Fashion Vibes”. She is a seasoned journalist who is dedicated to delivering the latest news to her readers. With a keen sense of what’s important, Mary covers a wide range of topics, from politics to lifestyle and everything in between.
