Concert in the Egg by a follower of Hieronymus Bosch, dating from around 1561 and hanging in the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Lille, France
When I was a child, my mother said that if you touched broken egg shells you would get warts. This may be because the egg shells I was touching at the time were among kitchen waste lying around beside an outside drain and it was a dirty thing to do – warts are caused by a viral infection (human papillomavirus).
My mother also said the inside of a broad-bean pod stroked on a wart and buried in the soil would cure the wart as the pod gradually rotted under the ground. Sympathetic magic, I guess.
But hey, it’s Easter and this post is supposed to be about eggs in art and it’s a good excuse to use some lovely pictures – a few of eggs in classical art and some more recent decorated eggs.
The painting above, called Concert in the Egg, is by a follower of Hieronymus Bosch and is in the typically surreal style of that school. It dates from around 1561 and hangs in the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Lille, France. Don’t ask me what the symbolism means in that one!
Then I came across this beautiful bed in the shape of an egg…
Cosy bed in the form of an egg by Thony Projekt - click on the picture to find out more
Returning to classical art, I find these two pictures of Leda and the Swan amusing, despite the biological impossibilities – those little human babies hatching from swan’s eggs…
Leda and the Swan - and babies hatched from eggs - by Francesco Melzi after a lost painting by Leonardo da Vinci. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, left, and by Francesco Bacchiacca, right, both painted in the early 1500s
You may recall the Greek myth – Leda was the wife of King Tyndareus. On the same night as she slept with her husband, she was seduced by Zeus, king of the gods, in the form of a swan. The result was two eggs, each containing twins (hang on a minute – weren’t they rather HUGE eggs to be delivered in the usual way? Ouch!). One pair of twins were Castor and Clytemnestra, children of Tyndareus, and the other were Helen and Polydeuces, children of Zeus.
Decorated egg shell dating back 60,000 years has been found in the Diepkloof Rock Shelter in Western Cape, South Africa - click on the picture to find out more...
Eggs have clearly been a fertility symbol for millennia and decorated eggs dating back 60,000 years have been found in the Diepkloof Rock Shelter in Western Cape, South Africa (read more here).
I have a memory of painting eggs with candle wax and then boiling them in coloured dye to make decorations. But it is a false memory – it was just one of my favourite “things to make and do” articles from an old children’s annual and I used to wish I had the sort of large, well-off family where you did that kind of art and craft.
The closest I came to that was drawing an egg shape by running a pencil around the cardboard holders we used to have in chocolate Easter eggs and using crayons to fill it in with patterns.
These days the packaging of chocolate Easter eggs is returning to something a bit more basic after years of excessive plastic packs. Here are a lovely pair of eggs from this year’s Tesco selection…
Finest Belgian Milk Chocolate Nutty Egg and Finest Belgian White Chocolate with Summer Berries, from a selection at Tesco for Easter 2010
Eggs such as hen’s eggs have that distinctive shape – caused by being squeezed out, so the top is narrowed, like a water droplet from a tap. Eggs of creatures with ovipositors, such as turtles, are spherical. The narrower top makes it so much more aesthetically pleasing.
The decoration of eggs is common in many cultures and here is a great blog post about Robin Bown’s Ukrainian decorated eggs, similar to the wax process I mention above.
Ukrainian egg painting by Robin Bown - click on the picture to find out more...
Eggs are still decorated in many ways today. Here are a couple of examples…
Pierced eggs from Franc Grom…
Pierced eggshell art by Franc Grom - click on the picture to find out more...
There are whole guilds of people practising egg art such as this…
Egg art by Loretta Paolis from a show at Easton, PA, in March 2010. Click on the picture to see lots more examples...
These artists are using real eggs such as those from ostrich, emu and rhea – because they are so big. But back in the days of the Russian tsars the most famous egg artist of all was of course Carl Fabergé, who used gold and precious materials instead of natural eggs.
Now that’s what I call going to work on an egg…
This, presented to Tsarina Alexandra in 1897, is a red gold and diamond egg containing a state carriage, from Carl Fabergé Goldsmith to the Imperial Court of Russia, a book by A Kenneth Snowman
More painted Easter egg images here…
The Squirrelbasket 
great.
Particularly the decorated egg models
Well, thank you kind sir…
‘The Cruellest Month’ by Louise Penny opens with the villagers of Three Pines in Quebec hiding painted wooden eggs for the annual children’s Easter egg hunt. They used to hide chocolate ones, but bears came and stole them, and terrorized the villagers by re-appearing the next Easter. Penny tells how a Czech couple introduced their native custom of painting wooden eggs, which was taken up enthusiastically by the Three Pines villagers, and the egg hunt was saved. Mind you, that’s a subplot – the main plot is murder.
http://www.louisepenny.com/
Must look up that one and read it! Didn’t know bears liked chocolate!
My great-grandmother used to create Christmas ornaments out of eggs. She would blow them out, cut an oval in the front, and create a diorama. Where she got the tiny little nativity sets and animals, I will never know. Craft shops were so limited back then!
Sounds very like the Faberge eggs!
All we managed to do was paint the eggs with candle-wax and dip them in beetroot-water to dye them 🙂