Between the second half of the fifteenth century and the second half of the seventeenth century, many classical painters added flies to their artwork.

And a number of them were keen to draw it so convincingly that it looked real.

André Chastel, a French art historian fond of Italy, attempted to trace the history of flies in painting.

At first, he presented the fly as an exotic masterpiece and an affirmation of the artist's skill and convictions.

It was considered a funny joke by ill-wishers, although it had more complex meanings than just a strange shape on the surface of very serious fine drawings.

The emergence of the symbolism of the fly in the paintings

The fly is an insect that is not popular, of course, but in artistic paintings it can transform from a mere source of repulsive nuisance into a profound artistic symbol, a connotation indicating death and the value of human life.

Because Renaissance thought tended to blend medieval fairy tales about nature with ideas about religion, flies were seen as representing a supernatural force, often associated with evil and corruption, because these insects seemed to be born spontaneously from rotting fruit and damaged organic matter.

And in the book of Exodus in the Bible, God swarmed swarms of flies as punishment, and they were harbingers of worse things, such as pestilence and death.

Classical art's use of the fly's symbolism in oil paintings escalated when the movement (La burla di Giotto) was born, which means "Giotto's joke", after the Florentine artist Giotto di Bondone of the fourteenth century, who is considered the genius who revived nature in European painting. And free art.

And the movement began precisely when the Italian artist wanted to represent the transience and instability of life, and the superficial, earthly joys whose value is not matched by anything.

Since that period, flies carried a symbolic meaning in the history of art. In the paintings drawn by various artists in the Renaissance in Europe, the fly symbol indicated the demise of human life, and that life is not worth more than the life of a minute and trivial insect, which is the artistic symbol that developed later and became It is called Musca depicta, or "painted fly" in Latin.

Diminutive of life

One of the most prominent examples of this theory is a small painting that is considered the most famous in embodying the symbolism of the meagerness of human life, and it is the painting known today as “The Portrait of a Lady from the Hoover Family”, painted around 1470 by an unknown artist of the German school (Swabian), and it is displayed today in The National Gallery in the British capital, London.

In the painting, a woman appears in a white hood standing in one side of a small fly, and the artist highlighted her dark presence against a white background in this way in an attempt to remind him that human life, just like a fly, is insignificant and temporary.

It was also possible for painters to include a fly in their paintings in order to draw attention to themselves in some way, and to show the spectators their deceptive tricks.

The fly was drawn in a very real way, so that it might tempt the spectator to try to hit the fly away from the painting so that he could focus on the artistic taste of the work.

Dutch artist Petrus Christus painted "The Carthusian Man", one of the most famous paintings in which a fly appears (Getty Images)

The 16th-century Italian painter Giorgio Vasari, biographer of Italian Renaissance artists, tells a story about the painter Giotto deceiving his tutor Cimabue by adding a realistic fly to one of his paintings.

In turn, the Dutch artist Petrus Christus painted the "Carthusian Man" painting, which is one of the most famous paintings in which a fly appears as well, and is now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

The painting depicts a bearded monk, yet the fly that floats on the imaginary frame in front of him indicates that things in reality are not as they appear in the picture, and that this world that the seer sees is "just an illusion."

Centuries later, Spanish painter and visual artist Salvador Dalí included a fly on the clock face in his famous 1931 painting The Perseverance of Memory, which is now on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

He also used an army of ants to denote the decay and fragility of time, and the unreliability of life.

"The Perseverance of Memory" by Salvador Dali (Source: ARS)

And this symbolism remains one of the most prominent artistic innovations that convey human recognition that life is no more than a small "fly".