The altarpiece panel “Feast of roses” (in some sources “Feast of wreaths of roses”), created by Albrecht Dürer in 1506 during the German painter’s trip to Venice. The original panel is kept in the People’s Gallery in Prague.
The panel has been seriously damaged and, since the seventeenth century, has been restored several times. That’s why some experts expressed doubts that the unexplained detail of the painting was added by the author himself. We are talking about a small fly painted in the central part of the plot. The insect sits on the cloth covering Our Lady’s lap, a composition between the Roman Emperor Maximilian I and the Christ Child. At the same time, the fly is depicted in detail and in life-size, although the other characters of the painting are painted in markedly smaller scale.
The tiny fly in Dürer’s painting confuses the experts.
The small detail is practically invisible to the uninitiated viewer; moreover, on the church altar, the panel was at a considerable distance from the eye and was hardly noticeable to most of the congregation.
Still, it is most likely that the fly was added to the painting directly by Dürer. This is evidenced by early copies made from the original and by lines from a poem written shortly after the panel’s creation, where the painting’s author is referred to as “the artist of the daring fly.”
There are several versions that seek to explain the presence of the fly in the composition. According to one of them, the insect, symbolizing negative, evil associations at the time, according to the author’s idea will soon be crushed by the foot of the infant Christ. At the same time, the location of the fly between Christ and the monarch could symbolize mortality and refer to the future crucifixion of Jesus, or on the other hand – to the temporality and relativity of earthly power in comparison with the power of God. We can not exclude more down-to-earth motives of the artist, who decided in a joking way to demonstrate his mastery of the brush or place a compositional emphasis in the picture.
In any case, the mystery of Dürer’s fly is unlikely to ever be exhaustively explained, still generating theories, versions and discussions around it.