Old masters had close encounters with medieval space oddities
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Roberto Volterri argues that artists as far back as 1406 included evidence of "strange objects in the sky" for later generations to see and that, far from being the product of paranoid Cold War years, UFOs were documented but overlooked because they were often "extraneous to the painting's subject" and could only be explained as "testimonials of something seen or heard about".
Volterri (56) has published a book, As The Ancient Chronicles Relate, in which the most striking example is The Madonna and St John, attributed to Fra Filippo Lippi (1406-1469). A man and a dog are "clearly gazing up at" a UFO-type object behind the Virgin Mary's shoulder.
Then there is a painting by Masolino da Panicale (1383-1447), The Miracle of the Snow, painted in 1429. It "shows a real event in Rome in the second half of the 4th century AD" but, asks the author, "what are these strange, dark, elongated clouds in the shape of UFOs?"
Signor Volterri says he compared them with photographs taken in 1955 in Namur, Belgium which purport to show cigar-shaped UFOs . . .
Glorification of the Eucharist, by Bonaventura Salimbeni (1567-1613), shows "what looks very like a satellite such as the Russian Sputnik".
In the painting Christ and a white-haired God are holding a metallic sphere from which protrudes "what appears to be the lens of a TV camera".
But Martin Kemp, professor of art history at Oxford University, says "many artists used their imaginations to represent celestial or sacred powers. Angels are not described in the Bible but painters gave them the form we are familiar with. You could call them flying objects." ( The Times, London)
- Richard Owen in Rome
