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UFOs in Paintings

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I don't know... I mean some of it maybe, but I'm an art major and I have seen some of this stuff in person and it all has to be put in context of the time and the common symbolism and iconography and in some cases (like comissioned work) what the comission was supposed to portray in general and all of that stuff. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a ufo hater, but some of this seems like a big stretch to me. I mean, they also have paintings of saints carying their heads around, but thats not because they actually saw the ghost of these people after they were martyred, it was for easy identification... Especially in the religious paintings, nothing is accidental. Everything down to the color of each flower can represent different people or concepts. I think a lot of flying elements in Christian paintings would have represented the holy spirit or possibly angels or popular saints. When something is comissioned by a church, I really don't see them being down with the idea of flying saucers in the work they paid for. One of my favorite proffessors is really good at iconography, maybe soon I can ask him what some of the stuff represents.
 
Okay, I just found this website that talks about some of the stuff I mentioned above.
http://www.ufomystic.com/2008/05/22/ufo-art-old-paintings/

I skimmed through a couple of the comments people left and one person was talking about an artist like Leonardo hiding his own symbolism, but the thing is, a lot of the Italian Ren stuff on the site was early and even paintings contributed to one guy, may have been a whole guild under that one guy. Back then art wasn't as much of a hobby as it was a formal occupation and there were big guilds of people working for or studying under an artist. For example a fresco that was comissioned to Cimabue, may have been something he didn't even touch, but just dirrected making it really "school of Cimabue"... so in cases like this, its more of a group instead of one guy with an agenda to hide ufo stuff. Some stuff we can't even tell who made it (the artist or his students).

Someone else replied that stars would have never been used in Catholic paintings, but I have seen loads of em in frescos in Catholic cathedrals. I particularly remember this being a strong theme in Assisi. It was either in St. Clair's Basillica or the St. Francis one, but one of those was full of moons and stars in the art and all over the ceiling.
 
I have heard that the manned rocket ships on either side of the Crucifixion are in fact fairly common & standard representations of the Sun and the Moon for that period, and are often in different colors as a result (one typically reddish, the other more neutral or blue).
 
bogie13p said:
I don't know... I mean some of it maybe, but I'm an art major and I have seen some of this stuff in person and it all has to be put in context of the time and the common symbolism and iconography and in some cases (like comissioned work) what the comission was supposed to portray in general and all of that stuff. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a ufo hater, but some of this seems like a big stretch to me. I mean, they also have paintings of saints carying their heads around, but thats not because they actually saw the ghost of these people after they were martyred, it was for easy identification... Especially in the religious paintings, nothing is accidental. Everything down to the color of each flower can represent different people or concepts. I think a lot of flying elements in Christian paintings would have represented the holy spirit or possibly angels or popular saints. When something is comissioned by a church, I really don't see them being down with the idea of flying saucers in the work they paid for. One of my favorite proffessors is really good at iconography, maybe soon I can ask him what some of the stuff represents.
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True, but you have to admit that in the Christian bible there are a lot of wierd things in there. I try and think of in the eye of the beholder of that time.........which is really hard to do! I don't know about UFOs. I've never seen one......but there are a lot of things I've never seen that are real. I know I've seen some really strange things in my life. I just posted on "Flat Black Things" I think there is a lot of BS out there. Some people are just nuts or liars. You are right that there was and still is a lot of iconography in art.......but it would be nice to just go back in time to see!
Best Regards,
Redheadnation
 
Speaking of weird art, this is kinda off the UFO subject, but have any of you guys ever looked at Hildegard of Bingens stuff? She was like this german mystic/saint who was a nun.. I think she was a midwife too. She would have these crazy headaches and be in intense pain that caused her to have these visions that she said were from God. Although the experiences really painful, she enjoyed them and I think she even compared them to some kind of spiritual ecstasy. Then she would paint her visions down. They made for some pretty funky art. In one she had this vision of how the soul enters the baby in a womans stomache and the souls are represented by all of these floating eyes that come down this tube to the stomache. It's so odd. All of her stuff is really weird. I read something where doctors went over her writings and descriptions of when she would have visions and they are saying that she was just menstral migraines. I'm not sure if I buy that, but shes pretty interesting either way. Plus its kinda cool because we have all the stuff she wrote down explaining her visions as well as her artistic depictions of them. A lot of her stuff looks like big mandalas and her depictions of Jesus almost make him look androgynous and almost more like a hindu god or something.

Grrr... unfortunately I couldn't find the floating eyeball painting online.
 
bogie13p said:
Speaking of weird art, this is kinda off the UFO subject, but have any of you guys ever looked at Hildegard of Bingens stuff?.
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Have you checked out Hilma af Klint?
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The Philosophy of the Mystery
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skunkape said:
Have you checked out Hilma af Klint?
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The Philosophy of the Mystery
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Wow, I actually had not heard of her. She seems really interesting too. That whole thing about "the five" is intriguing. Some of her geometric stuff reminds me of those spirograph toys that were popular in the 80s. Her stuff also reminds me of Hildegards as far as being kind of mandala like. I'll have to read more about her. Thanks.
 
bogie13p said:
Wow, I actually had not heard of her. She seems really interesting too. That whole thing about "the five" is intriguing. Some of her geometric stuff reminds me of those spirograph toys that were popular in the 80s. Her stuff also reminds me of Hildegards as far as being kind of mandala like. I'll have to read more about her. Thanks.
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Correction: the stuff that was reminding me of the spirograph was an artist named Emma Kunz. Her stuff keeps comming up when I'm looking at Hilma af Klint.
 
My favorite is Bonaventura Salimbeni's "Glorification of the Eucharist", with the Sputnik looking satellite. It looks like something someone faked but it is genuine. The "explaination" I read for this somewhere was about as bizarre as the painting itself. Religious symbology and all that jazz.
 
trainedobserver said:
My favorite is Bonaventura Salimbeni's "Glorification of the Eucharist", with the Sputnik looking satellite. It looks like something someone faked but it is genuine. The "explaination" I read for this somewhere was about as bizarre as the painting itself. Religious symbology and all that jazz.
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I couldn't find any extremely zoomed up pics on the net, but in artstor.org, people with an account can zoom way into this (like brush stroke close) and it looks more like they are drawing the world or creating it. It also has the sun and moon on the globe. It does kinda look like funky antenna, so I can see where people would get the whole ufo funky metal object idea.
 
bogie13p said:
I couldn't find any extremely zoomed up pics on the net, but in artstor.org, people with an account can zoom way into this (like brush stroke close) and it looks more like they are drawing the world or creating it. It also has the sun and moon on the globe. It does kinda look like funky antenna, so I can see where people would get the whole ufo funky metal object idea.
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Bogie,
You might like the book The Hidden Life of Art: Secrets and Symbols in Great Masterpieces (Clare Gibson). I just flipped through my copy, and couldn't find any of the pictures in this discussion referenced, but it is still a very interesting read.

Edited to note: In the middle ages, God was of a celestial nature; I would not find it unusual that the symbols used for the Holy Host to involve stars, shooting stars, and representations of light. In fact light beams have been used to represent God's intent, I can think of a couple of paintings of Mary where a light beam touches her to signify that God has chosen her to give birth to Jesus. Spheres were sometimes used to represent the world and God's dominance of it. Even in portraits or paintings of everyday life, there may be references to the importance of religion. In the tapestries, it could have even been that the hat symbol was used to denote that someone related to the family was a member of the clergy and the hat was a symbol of that relationship or to denote the importance of religion to the individuals pictured.
There is also a dearth of alchemical symbolism that is no longer understood as the meanings have been lost in history. The pictures are interesting, but I think that most can be explained knowing that symbolism was often used to expand the meaning of a piece of art in past ages. The Nuremberg woodcut is the one that I think defies explanation.
 
yeah, I'll have to check out that book. I love stuff like that. I have one that is all about Renaissance symbolism that I could probably look through to understand some of the stuff, but I'll save that for a day when I'm really bored. haha.

As for the light beams and Mary stuff, that stuff shows up a lot in Annunciation pieces. There is this one, the Merode Altarpiece, where Baby Jesus is flying in through the window while Mary is sitting there. If you take a ruler and follow the beams behind flying baby jesus, he is shooting right to her stomach and I always found it pretty hillarious. The baby is so tiny, you really have to look for it comming through the window.

15thflnd-4.jpg




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bogie13p said:
yeah, I'll have to check out that book. I love stuff like that. I have one that is all about Renaissance symbolism that I could probably look through to understand some of the stuff, but I'll save that for a day when I'm really bored. haha.
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What is the title? I may have to check it out. Carlo Crivelli's work is the first painting that came to my mind.
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Red said:
What is the title? I may have to check it out. Carlo Crivelli's work is the first painting that came to my mind.
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Um... I looked and I couldn't find my book. I think someone is borrowing it right now (i hope), but I think it's called "Hidden Life of Renaissance Art" or something like that. I don't remember who the author is.
 
I noticed that Bogie linked to my ufomystic article from awhile back, which concluded (or very nearly so) that UFO-looking things in Italian Renaissance paintings could be comfortably regarded as standard depictions of divine events. That post engendered some of the more heated debate on the site. It also showed that some people expose their belief systems more than react to what they supposedly read. The general opinion of the "it's UFO" believers seemed to think that I thought that ALL strange objects in ALL art from ALL periods of history were not depictions of unknown objects in the skies. I was only discussing religious paintings from the Italian Renaissance.

Near the end of the comments, I asked what caused the iconography to take on the appearance of flying discs and halos in the first place, which is perhaps the real question. No one brought up the Nuremburg (1561) and Basel (1566) accounts and woodblock prints.

My only degree is in art history, so the subject was particularly interesting to me.
 
spacebrother said:
No one brought up the Nuremburg (1561) and Basel (1566) accounts and woodblock prints.

My only degree is in art history, so the subject was particularly interesting to me.
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Wow, those are really interesting links and I love both of those prints. It is especially neat to know the story behind them. It really makes you wonder what was going on in the sky back then. Plus it's kind of interesting how both incidents happened in the 1560s and relatively close to one another ....or at least neighboring countries as opposed to different continents or something.
 
bogie13p said:
Wow, those are really interesting links and I love both of those prints. It is especially neat to know the story behind them. It really makes you wonder what was going on in the sky back then. Plus it's kind of interesting how both incidents happened in the 1560s and relatively close to one another ....or at least neighboring countries as opposed to different continents or something.
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I'm still waiting to uncover an account from Italy between 1400 and 1700. An artistic depiction would be even better. Maybe there was a flap in northern Europe in the 1560s!

I posted an article with a piece on Hilma Af Klimt at ufomystic in 2007.
 
spacebrother said:
I'm still waiting to uncover an account from Italy between 1400 and 1700. An artistic depiction would be even better. Maybe there was a flap in northern Europe in the 1560s!

I posted an article with a piece on Hilma Af Klimt at ufomystic in 2007.
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Wow, that does look like DNA. thats a really cool story. Especially since the painting was before the discovery of the DNA molecule. I mean, it could be just a ribbon i suppose, but with the title and all that she described, it seems to lean toward something else. I like it! I will really need to read more about her and her work. I just learned about her the other day on here.
 
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