A nearly invisible fly sits behind Vespucci’s portrait in the border of Waldseemüller’s Universalis Cosmographia (see above top right). It was noticed, Heather Wanser writes, as each sheet of Waldseemüller’s Universalis Cosmographia was extracted from Schöner’s Sammelband as part of the preservation process at the Library of Congress. It might be “a bit of whimsey on the part of the artist” she suggests, while others claim that it is a wasp and that it refers to Vespucci’s family in Florence who used a wasp (vespa in Latin) as part of their  family crest.*

This insect behind Vespucci’s head is certainly a fly. What meaning might it hold?

Other flies appeared in works of art made in Germany, or by German artists c. 1500. The Portrait of a Woman of the Hofer Family c. 1460, by an unknown Swabian artist, has a carefully executed fly on the sitter’s white headdress. Explaining the presence of the fly in the portrait, art historian Jill Dunkerton writes, “the viewer is surely intended to puzzle over whether the fly is part of the painting or whether it could be a real fly which has landed on the surface of the picture.” A possible reason might be, she continues, the artist’s intent to remind the viewer “of the skill which has been necessary to create this apparently three-dimensional image on a flat panel.”**

Another meaning is the association between the fly and mortality. In several works by Dürer, the fly is associated with the birth of Jesus, reminding viewers of his short life. In The Holy Family with the Mayfly, c. 1495 Dürer places Mary and the baby Jesus in the center, with a mayfly at the lower right. The mayfly is an insect of the order Ephemeroptera which, in its last stage of development, the imago (winged stage), lives only for a day. Colin Eisler writes that in Dürer’s engraving, the mayfly is “the only creature allowed to share the foreground with the mother and her baby,” and that it carries the “sad message” of the “brevity of his life on earth.”***

The meaning of the fly in Vespucci’s portrait is surely not tied to Vespucci’s mortality. Possibly, it is a design signature of the designer or woodcutter—a clever, inside joke that shows off the talent and skill of the artisans working in the woodcut medium.

*Heather Wanser, “Treatment and Preparation of Waldseemüller’s Map,” Information Bulletin September 2003, Library of Congress. That it is in fact a wasp: Waldseemüller, Martin and John Hessler, Naming of America: Martin Waldseemuller’s 1507 World Map and the Cosmographiae Introductio (London: Giles, 2008), 25. On the vespa/wasp on the Vespucci family crest, see Irene Mariani, “The Vespucci Family: Vespucci: The Wasps of Florence,” The Vespucci Family (blog), November 30, 2010, http://thevespuccifamily.blogspot.com/2010/11/vespucci-wasps-of-florence.html.

**Jill Dunkerton, Giotto to Dürer: Early Renaissance Painting in The National Gallery (New Haven: Yale University Press in association with National Gallery Publications, 1991), 300-301.

***Eisler, Dürer’s Animals, 18. Dürer also included a fly in the lower left of his painting of The Adoration of the Magi, 1504. Dürer’s Feast of the Rosegarlands, is known in several versions, one of which has a prominent fly on Mary’s knee.