The UFOs in old art aren't UFOs.

The premise

Since the late 1960s, books and websites have pointed at objects in old paintings — glowing discs, clouds, halos, spheres, even cardinal's hats — and claimed them as evidence that extraterrestrial craft were visiting Earth and were faithfully recorded by pious Medieval and Renaissance painters.

In every well-known case, the object has a perfectly ordinary art-historical meaning. It is part of a visual vocabulary shared across Europe for centuries, documented in treatises, iconographic dictionaries, and tens of thousands of parallel images.

This site collects those famous examples, pairs each with the specific UFO claim, and explains what the thing actually is.

How to read a religious painting

Medieval and Renaissance religious painting is not "realism with a theological filter" — it is a language, learned by apprentices in workshop and recognised at a glance by any literate contemporary. An unidentified shape in a 15th-century altarpiece is rarely unidentified to an iconographer; it is almost always one of a few hundred well-catalogued devices. Six conventions account for almost every "UFO" in the modern literature, and the rest of the vocabulary is worth knowing because the same principles apply elsewhere.

1. Attributes

Saints and allegorical figures are identified by fixed objects called attributes. The convention begins in Early Christian art, is codified in the 13th-century Golden Legend (Jacobus de Voragine), and is reinforced by the painter's manual tradition — most influentially by Andrea da Bologna around 1348 and by Cesare Ripa's Iconologia (1593), a book so authoritative that Baroque painters kept it at the easel. Peter has keys; Mark has a lion; Catherine has a broken wheel; Lucy carries her eyes on a plate. Jerome has a red cardinal's galero on the ground beside him (signalling an office he renounced for the desert) and a tame lion — the galero is so strongly attached to him that painters continued to include it after they had otherwise dropped the anachronism. Mistaking an attribute for an anomalous object is the single most common error in fringe-iconographic writing.

2. The vocabulary of the divine: nimbus, mandorla, glory, cloud

Divinity in Western painting is almost never shown as a human figure directly; it is shown through a stack of geometric screens between the sacred and the viewer. A nimbus is a round halo behind a holy head; Christ's nimbus contains a cross (the cruciform nimbus); a living person at the time of the painting (e.g. a donor bishop) gets a square nimbus. A mandorla (Italian for "almond") is an almond-shaped body-halo used for figures in glory — Christ at the Transfiguration, Christ in Majesty, the Virgin in Assumption scenes. A glory is a mandorla expanded into radiating light, often populated with small angels or cherub-heads. Clouds are the most flexible of these devices: they conceal, reveal, transport, and surround the divine, and they are the single iconographic category most often misread as a craft.

The theology is not improvised. Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (6th c.) writes in The Celestial Hierarchy that "the Scriptures represent [angels] in the form of clouds, to indicate that the holy entities are filled with a hidden light." Marco Bussagli (History of Angels, Rusconi 1991) traces the "cloud-angel" type from this passage through medieval iconography to its Baroque climax. Every dense, outlined, luminous cloud in a Nativity or an Annunciation is part of this tradition. — the full essay is here.

3. Rays of light and the Hand of God

Rays of light in religious painting are never decorative. They carry specific theological content: the Annunciation ray carrying the Holy Spirit (as a dove, sometimes also a tiny Christ-child) to Mary; the rays of grace descending at the Baptism of Christ; the tongues of fire at Pentecost; the rays emanating from the Eucharistic host. The manus Dei ("Hand of God") — a disembodied hand emerging from a cloud to bless, create, or send the Spirit — is an early-medieval shorthand for the Father that Latin painters kept in use long after they had started depicting the full figure. A beam from a cloud above, terminating on the head of a saint, is a visual sentence: grace descends.

4. Celestial bodies as characters

The Sun, the Moon, and individual stars are active participants in religious painting, not background scenery. The Sun and Moon flanking the cross is a Byzantine convention visible already in 6th-century mosaics; James Hall (Dictionary of Subjects and Symbols in Art) notes that in medieval versions they are personified — the Sun as a male bust with a radiant halo, the Moon as a female bust with a crescent — while in later forms they become plain discs, sometimes borne by angels, with the Sun always at Christ's right. Three stars on the Virgin's veil or shoulder (forehead, right shoulder, left shoulder) mark the "threefold virginity" before, during, and after the birth — a Byzantine attribute that Western Marian painting inherits. The Star of Bethlehem, when present, is often woven into a cloud of angels over the manger.

5. Cosmological devices: the globe, the wheel, the tetramorph

A sphere held by God, by Christ, or between the Persons of the Trinity is the globus mundi or (when topped with a cross) the globus cruciger: the created cosmos under divine dominion. It inherits from Hellenistic imperial imagery (the emperor as kosmokrator) and is a standing attribute of divine rulership from the 5th century onward. The wheels-within-wheels of Ezekiel 1, often accompanied by the four living creatures called the tetramorph (man, lion, ox, eagle — later fixed as the symbols of the four Evangelists), belong to a separate but related cosmological grammar. Neither is a vehicle; both are visual statements about the order of creation.

6. Narrative compression and apocryphal sources

A single panel can show several moments of a story at once. An Adoration of the Shepherds typically includes a tiny background scene of the Annunciation to the Shepherds — the same shepherds, out in the fields, at the moment they received the news — because both moments belong to the Nativity cycle. A Crucifixion can juxtapose the Fall of Adam with the Redemption on a single vertical axis (Mary as the "new Eve"). A small sub-scene, framed as a "window" in the sky or landscape, is structural, not supernatural.

Much of what appears in these images is not directly in the canonical Gospels. The "luminous cloud... that the eyes could not bear" of the Nativity comes from the Protevangelium of James (Ch. 19); Joachim and Anna's story comes from the same source; the names of the Magi, the midwife, and the ox-and-ass come from the Golden Legend; Christ's descent into Limbo comes from the Gospel of Nicodemus. Painters drew from this wider textual reservoir freely. A shepherd shielding his eyes from a bright cloud is a direct illustration of the Protoevangelium; treating it as an independent observation of the sky misses both the text and the genre.

Suggested further reading

• James Hall, Dictionary of Subjects and Symbols in Art, rev. ed. (Westview Press / John Murray). The single most-used working reference for Western Christian iconography.
• Cesare Ripa, Iconologia (first edition Rome, 1593; illustrated edition 1603) — the painter's encyclopaedia of personifications and attributes that shaped Baroque imagery across Europe. Public-domain scan on Internet Archive.
• Émile Mâle, Religious Art in France, three volumes (XIIIe, XIIe, XVIIe siècle). The classic trilogy on medieval French iconography; Mâle's approach has shaped every subsequent study.
• Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology (1939) and Meaning in the Visual Arts (1955) — the theoretical basis of iconographic reading.
• Marco Bussagli, Storia degli Angeli (Rusconi, 1991) and Le ali di Dio — the standard modern monograph on angel-iconography, including the cloud-angel type.
• Roelof van Straten, An Introduction to Iconography (Gordon and Breach, 1985) — the best short methodological primer.
• Jacobus de Voragine, Legenda Aurea (The Golden Legend), c. 1260 — the indispensable 13th-century narrative source for saints' lives. Fordham Medieval Sourcebook.
• The Protevangelium of James (2nd century) — the apocryphal gospel that supplies much of Nativity iconography. English text.
• Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, The Celestial Hierarchy — the theological basis of cloud-and-light angelology. English translation.

Credit where due

The definitive debunking in this field is Diego Cuoghi's "Art and UFOs? No thanks, only art", published in Italian and translated into English in 2002. This site is an homage — same material, modern interface.

For the standard reference works on iconography, see James Hall's Dictionary of Subjects and Symbols in Art and Émile Mâle's Religious Art in France of the Thirteenth Century.