The Everyday Fly, Extraordinary: A Moody Housefly Portrait in the Italian Poster Style
Face to face, she is not what you expected. Two enormous faceted eyes like dark honeycomb domes, a face of gold and shadow, a body furred like a tiny bear and banded in rust: enlarged to poster scale, the housefly stops being a pest and becomes a piece of engineering so ornate it verges on jewelry. She is the boldest enlargement in our Italian Poster Style series, where each animal is staged alone on velvet black in the lamplight of Italy's classic advertising posters. The posters enlarged bottles until they were monuments. The fly, enlarged, is a revelation with wings.
There is also a fairness to it. The fly has attended every meal, every café, every summer afternoon of your life, uninvited and unphotographed. The series exists to give overlooked creatures their sitting. None has been overlooked at closer range, or with more dedication, than this one.
From the Collection
Vintage Housefly Wall Art Print, 1920's Italian Poster Style
A housefly face to face: two great faceted eyes, gold and black fur, and a rust red abdomen.
From $34.50 · Free shipping
VIEW THE PRINTPrint Details
- Archival matte paper, 189 g/m², with pigment inks
- Unframed: 12″ × 18″ or 24″ × 36″
- Framed in Black, Red Oak or White Ayous wood, ready to hang
- Printed on demand; allow 5 to 12 business days for delivery
Keep Reading
The Uninvited Guest, Immortalized: A Cockroach Portrait in the Italian Poster Style
The Posters Behind the Series
Enlargement was the poster artist's declaration of faith: anything, printed large enough and lit warmly enough, becomes worthy of attention. Cappiello built a career on it, raising clowns and liqueurs to the size of buildings, as we recount in Orange Burst of Optimism. The fly portrait simply extends the faith past the point of comfort, and finds, past that point, a strange beauty waiting with compound eyes.
She is not even the series' only insect. She shares the bill with a cockroach elsewhere in the menagerie, the two of them forming its smallest and most argumentative wing. Between them they test the founding idea to destruction: if the stage can glorify these two, the stage can glorify anything, and the whole menagerie is justified.
Reading the Portrait
The symmetry is the first surprise. We are used to the fly in profile, a speck, a zigzag. Frontal, she is heraldic: the twin eye domes like the bosses of a shield, the small triangular face between them worked in gold, the furry thorax below in black and amber, and the abdomen finishing the composition in a great shield of rust red, furred and glowing like a coal under ash. The wings enter at the frame's edges as translucent architecture, veined like the glass of a cathedral window.
The drawing lavishes its finest textures on her: the eye facets in tiny regular cells, the bristles in fine black strokes, the fur of the body in dense engraved hatching. At poster scale she reads less like an insect than like a machine built by a jeweler with a sense of humor, which, on the evidence, is not a bad description of evolution's own work.
The Fly in Italian Art
Italy gave the fly its most famous role in painting five centuries before this portrait. Renaissance workshops delighted in the trompe-l'oeil fly, a fly painted at life size on a portrait's frame or a saint's robe, so lifelike that viewers tried to brush it away; legend says the young Giotto painted one on a face by his master Cimabue, who reached out to flick it off and discovered it was art. The painted fly became a signature trick, a wink about the power of representation, and flies haunt Italian still lifes ever after as tiny memento mori, reminders that even summer afternoons are mortal.
Our fly inherits that wink and enlarges it beyond brushing range. She is the trompe-l'oeil fly promoted from footnote to subject, the joke about representation turned into the representation itself, and she holds the wall with the confidence of a creature who has been fooling painters since Giotto.
Velvet and the Engraved Line
Each surface in this portrait gets its own technique: the eyes in faceted cells, the wings in single veined lines, the thorax in fur hatching as dense as any mammal's in the series. It is the engraver's full toolkit spent on the smallest sitter, and the variety makes the picture shimmer, matte against gloss against gauze, all of it suspended in the scratched velvet darkness the series uses for night.
Printed at scale, the fly has an effect no gallery label can prepare you for: people lean in. The pest of a million picnics becomes the portrait visitors approach closest, counting facets, tracing wing veins. Attention, the portrait argues, was the only thing she was ever missing.
One of a Menagerie
The fly keeps company with the full poster series, from the beagle to the cockroach, all staged on the same dark ground, a menagerie introduced in Italian-Inspired Animal Prints: Quiet Drama with a Graphic Edge. She is its smallest sitter and its largest surprise. The whole company is in our 1920's Italian Poster Style collection.
