Paintings With Hidden Details & Visual Puzzles

Hans Holbein the Younger, 1533. Find the long pale shape crossing the tiles between the two men. Look from an oblique angle at the side of the painting, and its stretched contours resolve into a skull. A sliver of crucifix also peeks out behind the green curtain in the upper left.

Golconda, India, 1500s. Look at the whole silhouette to see an elephant carrying a prince, then let your eye travel along the animal’s outline. The huge body is made of smaller figures intertwined with one another. Follow the legs inward and the outline you recognized at a glance breaks into many individual poses.

Giuseppe Arcimboldo, late 1500s. Start with the bowl of vegetables. Turn the image upside down and the bowl becomes a hat, with the vegetables below it forming a face. The trick is to follow the same painted outlines through both readings, even after you know the face is there.

Jan van Eyck, 1434. Look into the little convex mirror on the back wall. It shows the couple from behind and two more figures in the doorway. Ten tiny scenes around its frame relate to Christ’s Passion. You can see all of that without deciding who the visitors are or what occasion brought them there.

William Scrots, 1546. Viewed from the front, the young prince’s profile seems stretched sideways. A notch on the right of the original frame marks where a viewing device once sat. Look from that side and his features come back into proportion. Holbein uses a similar trick to hide a skull. Here it changes the most important face in the picture.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1559. Start in the foreground with the woman wrapping a blue cloak around her husband, a gesture for deceiving him. Farther left, an upside-down globe signals a world turned on its head. Once you find those clues, the little scenes around them begin to look like sayings made literal.

Look below the ship near the lower right. The legs disappearing into the water belong to Icarus, who is easy to miss beside the plowman, shepherd, and busy coast. The Brussels museum treats the painting’s attribution as a question. The position and scale of Icarus are things you can check for yourself.

Cornelius Norbertus Gijsbrechts, about 1670. The stretcher, tacks, and folded edges of the canvas make you think someone has hung a painting with its back facing out. Look for the small paper label. Its folds and shadows are as much part of the illusion as the apparent wood around it.

Pere Borrell del Caso, 1874. The boy grips what looks like the frame and plants a foot on its lower edge. That boundary is painted inside the canvas. Trace the shadows at his hands and feet to see how the picture makes an ordinary border look like something solid enough to climb through.

James Ensor painted the parade in 1888. Look past the bright masks and banners toward the center until you see the small figure with a halo. The painting gives the title character much less visual space than the people around him. Try finding him before you let the banners lead you there.

Salvador Dalí, 1937. Compare the swans with the shapes they cast in the water. The curved necks become trunks, the bodies give the elephants their ears, and the reflected trees supply the legs and bulk. The waterline lets you switch between the two readings without moving the picture.

Diego Velázquez, 1656. Find the small illuminated rectangle in the back wall and the two faces of Philip IV and Mariana of Austria. The mirror makes them present in a room where their bodies are outside the scene we can see. What exactly the mirror reflects is still debated, which makes it worth starting with what the painting actually shows.