20 Artists Who Got Revenge By Hiding It In Their Art

While Michelangelo was still working on The Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel around 1541, the Pope’s Master of Ceremonies, Biagio da Cesena, stopped by to see it. I mean, if I knew it was going to be a hit, I would’ve passed by as well! I personally would’ve just admired it, but Biagio declared that all the imagery painted was far more suitable to be seen in a tavern instead of a chapel. As revenge, Michelangelo painted Cesena’s face onto Minos, the mythological judge of the underworld. The funny detail is that Minos has the ears of a donkey, and there’s actually a snake biting his private parts. When told of the complaint, Pope Paul III reportedly commented that he had no jurisdiction past the gates of Hell.

Marcel Duchamp had been poking the eyes of the art establishment for years, such as putting a urinal in an exhibition in New York and calling it a sculpture. So in 1919, the 400th anniversary of the death of Leonardo da Vinci, Duchamp took a cheap postcard of the Mona Lisa, added a moustache and a goatee and wrote ‘L.H.O.O.Q.’ These five letters, said out loud in French, sounded like, ‘she’s got a hot backside.’ The obscenity went unnoticed unless the initials were said aloud.

When Nelson Rockefeller hired Diego Rivera to paint a mural for Rockefeller Center in 1933, Rivera included a portrait of Lenin that Rockefeller hadn’t approved. Rivera refused to take it out, and Rockefeller had it covered up, then smashed it in February 1934. Rivera promptly repainted the mural in Mexico City, where he left Lenin and added Rockefeller drinking below an enlarged microscope slide showing syphilis bacteria.

After her art tutor, Agostino Tassi, violated her in 1611, when she was just seventeen, Artemisia Gentileschi was tortured with thumbscrews during his 1612 trial to prove that she was telling the truth. After his conviction, she painted Judith Slaying Holofernes, which depicts a man struggling as two women brutally decapitate him, with his blood soaking into the bedsheets. Many art historians interpret Holofernes’s resemblance to Tassi as a deliberate act of visual retaliation, channeling the trauma of her trial into paint.

Boss Tweed, a notoriously corrupt New York political boss, reportedly said his supporters couldn’t read a newspaper, but he knew they could understand a political cartoon. Cartoonist Thomas Nast’s political cartoons portraying Tweed as a bloated thief appeared continually in Harper’s Weekly. In 1875, Tweed fled to Spain, but in 1876 he was recognized and arrested based only on Nast’s cartoons.

British shipping magnate Frederick Leyland hired artist James McNeill Whistler to decorate his dining room in 1876, creating what became the famous Peacock Room. Then they fell out spectacularly over money. Leyland was not pleased with the bill. He even had the audacity to pay Whistler in pounds rather than guineas, a professional insult, and refused to let him into his house. In 1879, Whistler got his revenge on canvas, painting Leyland as a scaly, peacock-like monster clutching moneybags atop Whistler’s house.

The painting that almost led to Salvador Dalí’s expulsion from the Surrealist movement was The Enigma of William Tell (1933), which was created in response to his political disagreements with André Breton, the leader of the Surrealist movement. Despite its title, the painting doesn’t show William Tell at all. It shows Lenin kneeling, without his trousers. His disproportionately long buttock is resting on a crutch. In 1934, it was shown at the Salon des Indépendants, where a group of Breton’s followers tried, but failed, to attack Dalí’s canvas.

French caricaturist Honoré Daumier learned the hard way that mocking the king could come with actual jail time. In a caricature published on December 15, 1831, he depicted King Louis-Philippe I as a pear-headed giant sitting on a toilet throne, consuming taxpayer money from the poor and passing royal favors to the rich. Daumier was convicted of insulting the king, sentenced to six months in prison, and fined 500 francs. He served part of his prison term in a private psychiatric clinic rather than a regular prison.

At the 1865 Salon, patrons attempted to poke Édouard Manet’s Olympia with their canes, forcing staff to move the painting higher up the wall. Painted in 1863, Olympia features a direct, challenging gaze that outraged art critics, especially since its subject matter is an unidealized, working-class Parisian prostitute, lying on a couch in nothing but a ribbon and her slippers, and not a reclining goddess, the standard fare for such nudity.

Around 1509, while working in the Pope’s apartments, Raphael somehow got a peek at Michelangelo’s nearby Sistine Chapel ceiling, which was still being painted in secrecy. The results can be seen in Raphael’s The School of Athens. He added the ancient philosopher Heraclitus with Michelangelo’s face, sitting alone and brooding while everyone else mingles around him. The figure is at once a homage to and a jab at Michelangelo’s famously difficult personality.

Italian painters Giovanni Baglione and Caravaggio did not get along, and their feud eventually spilled into both paintings and a courtroom. In his 1602 painting Sacred Love and Profane Love, Baglione included an angel defeating Profane Love while a devil with features resembling Caravaggio cowers nearby. The painting came after Caravaggio and his circle mocked Baglione and circulated obscene poems about him. In 1603, Baglione also accused Caravaggio of libel, and records of the trial indicate that Caravaggio spent some time in prison as a result.

In 1478, members of the Pazzi family and their allies tried to overthrow Florence’s powerful Medici family. The attack left Giuliano de’ Medici dead inside Florence Cathedral, while his brother Lorenzo survived. Lorenzo then commissioned Sandro Botticelli to paint the executed conspirators hanging upside down on the facade of Florence’s municipal palace, with their identities clearly visible. The commission is corroborated in financial records from July 1478. When the Medici were expelled from Florence in 1494, the frescoes were destroyed, so none of them survive today.

Martin Luther wasn’t fighting the Catholic Church with words alone. In May 1521, he and artist Lucas Cranach the Elder collaborated on a series of 26 propaganda woodcuts arranged into 13 contrasting pairs. In one, we see Christ humbly washing his disciples’ feet. The facing image depicts the Pope demanding that kings kiss his feet and being dragged, damned, into Hell. Subtle, they were not. It was a group project, though, rather than a personal grudge on Cranach’s part.

Almost two decades before Martin Luther published his famous Ninety-five Theses in 1517, Albrecht Dürer published his 15-print series titled The Apocalypse, which included the woodcut The Whore of Babylon. Here, corrupt elites, including figures marked by papal and bishops’ headwear, are dragged into Hell. While later Protestants adopted the imagery for their own Reformation propaganda, Dürer’s original work reflected the broader anti-clerical criticism already circulating in late-medieval Europe.

Napoleon Bonaparte was said to have declared that James Gillray, along with other British political caricaturists, did him more harm than all the armies of Europe put together. Gillray’s The Plumb-pudding in Danger, published on February 26, 1805, shows British Prime Minister William Pitt and Napoleon literally carving up a globe-shaped plum pudding between them: Pitt takes the seas, while Napoleon takes Europe. Political cartoons really used to go straight for the visual metaphor.

German artist George Grosz had very little affection for the people running his country, and his 1926 painting Pillars of Society makes that abundantly clear. Grosz depicted a journalist wearing a chamber pot; a nationalist politician holding a beer mug beside a swastika, with a chamber pot resting on his head; and a priest blessing military violence while ignoring the burning buildings behind him. These grotesque figures were Grosz’s attack on the journalists, nationalists, clergy, and other elites he saw helping Germany slide toward authoritarianism. The Nazis later labeled Grosz a “degenerate artist,” and he left Germany for the United States in 1933.

In 1799, Spanish court painter Francisco Goya published Los Caprichos, a set of 80 etchings that satirized the clergy and the corrupt and idle aristocracy. One etching, titled Tu que no puedes, shows two bloated, well-dressed nobles literally riding on the backs of exhausted and starving peasants. He removed the prints from sale shortly after their release, reportedly fearing repercussions from the Spanish Inquisition.

When Gustave Courbet’s massive 1855 painting The Painter’s Studio was rejected by the official Exposition Universelle in Paris, he responded by building his own pavilion and showing it himself. One section of the painting is devoted to poverty and exploitation, where a poacher accompanied by hunting dogs has been interpreted by art historian Hélène Toussaint and others as a disguised Napoleon III, then Emperor of France. It’s an interpretation rather than a confirmed identification, which may be fitting for an insult supposedly hidden in plain sight.

In Jacques-Louis David’s enormous painting The Coronation of Napoleon, Napoleon’s mother, Letizia Ramolino, can be seen sitting prominently on a balcony above the ceremony. There’s just one problem: she wasn’t there. She had boycotted the event amid family tensions and was in Rome when the ceremony was held on December 2, 1804. But Napoleon ordered Jacques-Louis David to include her. So this wasn’t David getting his facts wrong; Napoleon wanted his family portrait to look a little more united than the family actually was.

Titian painted The Flaying of Marsyas late in his life, and the subject is every bit as unpleasant as the title suggests. In the Greek myth, the satyr Marsyas loses a musical contest to the god Apollo and is punished by being skinned alive. Titian included King Midas, a figure from a related myth who had sided against Apollo, watching the torture with features resembling Titian’s own aging face. Some scholars have read the painting as a grim reflection on what it meant for an artist like Titian to spend his career dependent on powerful rulers such as King Philip II. If that’s what Titian intended, this was less a cheeky Easter egg and more one very tired artist looking back at the price of serving power.

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