Nature gets an A+ for inventing the butterfly. Even under cloudy skies, these winged creatures cannot help but infuse the great outdoors with a jolt of ethereal beauty. Unlike other insects, they are a marvel to behold and almost never cause us to scream and run away. Butterflies and their brothers in wings—the moths—have a calming, joyful effect on observers. You stop what you’re doing, your jaw goes slack, and you maybe even smile.

We ponder the butterfly’s fascinating transformation from caterpillar to chrysalis to winged paragon of the lightness of being. For eons this process has served as a symbol of everything from adolescence to self actualization to freedom. This symbolism has entered our culture through the butterfly motifs on clothing, home decor, and scrapbooking supplies. Despite this insect’s omnipresence and its superior reputation, the butterfly is nearly absent from the canon of Western art. How did that happen?

Of course, butterflies can be found here and there in the annals of art history, but their painted likenesses are as hit or miss as their countenance on a warm spring day. One of the earliest depictions of a butterfly in art history is from a stone fragment of an Egyptian tomb of a scribe, known as Nebamun Hunting in the Marshes (1350 BCE). The scene depicts Nebamun enjoying his afterlife in a world thick with wildlife, from birds to cats to fish to butterflies. It’s the Nile at its best—it’s not flooding and wiping out whole villages.

Nebamun, along with a couple of servants, or maybe a girlfriend, are having a successful day of hunting in the park. Looks like he’s aiming for the birds; the butterflies appear to be safe.

Several Mesoamerican civilizations were known to use the butterfly motif. The residents of the ancient city of Teotihuacan in modern-day Mexico carved stylized butterflies into their buildings and used them as a motif for jewelry and incense burners. Some archaeologists believe the Butterfly God was a pre-Columbian guardian diety of merchants and envoys. The Aztec goddess Itzpapalotl (“Clawed Butterfly”) was a warrior goddess, a stylized butterfly, who ruled over the paradise where dead babies lived, and she looks like no butterfly you’ve ever seen floating through your backyard.

Other Mesoamerican butterflies, as carved into temples and whatnot, are stylized but not nearly as vicious looking:

In fact, I’ll bet you could find these creatures on a set of rubber stamps at your hometown Jo-Ann Fabrics & Crafts.

Over on the other side of the world, the butterfly was a common motif in Asian art. Xu Xi, who lived from 886 to 975 in the Song Dynasty is the artist of Butterfly and Chinese Wisteria Flowers, a beautiful composition of delicate white blossoms trickling down from delicate branches and visited by a blue Lepidoptera, with a sufficiently blank background that forces the eye to linger over the delicate, organic elements.

I have always loved the Asian propensity for art that venerates nature without a human presence. Sometimes a girl gets tired of allegory, religion, and symbolism messing with the colors and form. In illustrations such as these, the flowers and the butterfly speak for themselves; they are a visual treat that needs no context beyond what the artist gives us.

Art in Japan follows a similar aesthetic. In the Japanese tradition, the butterfly symbolizes an individual’s soul.

This woodblock print  is called Peonies and Butterfly it’s by Hokusai and it’s from the 1830s. Like the Xu Xi from a thousand years earlier, this painting portrays the delicate, perfumed flower blooms, this time visited by a pink and black butterfly. This is small-scale majestic nature, as opposed to his large-scale majestic nature of his famous 36 Views of Mount Fuji.

While these few examples present only a rough outline of the history of the butterfly in non-Western art, they weren’t as hard for me to track down as examples of butterflies in Western art. Yes, there are a few, but when compared to other winged creatures: Birds, angels, heck—even turkeys—these ethereal airborne wonders are in short supply.

In 1522 Dosso Dossi (I’ve never heard of him either) painted something called Jupiter Painting Butterflies, Mercury and Virtue.

This is a great painting, and I had no idea that Jupiter was a Sunday painter. I love how Mercury is telling Virtue to shut up, and how casually Jupiter approaches the canvas, with legs crossed, as if he’s taking a well-deserved break from smiting lesser gods. Any minute now Juno is going to tell him to wash his hands and come to dinner. As for Dossi’s symbolism, it’s all over the place—your guess is as good as mine. The delicate butterflies Jupiter paints seem an odd subject for the king of gods, but the fact that there are three of them seems relevant—three is the magic number. Maybe his job is stressful, and he wishes he could fly away into anonymity, light as a feather, unburdened by the fact that he married his sister.

A hundred years later in the northern world of Flanders, Dutch artist Jan Davidsz. de Heem painted Still Life with Fruit and Butterflies (1652). I like this because it reminds me of one of my favorite albums from my prog rock phase: Exotic Birds and Fruit by Procol Harum (although that cover is by Jakob Bogdani, a Slovakian artist of roughly the same time period as de Heem). The painting’s fresh and rancid fruit reminds us of life before refrigeration, and the two butterflies, one a tiny white thing, the other a more masculine looking brown, red, and black creation, lend the composition the counterbalance it needs to detract from the heaviness of the foliage and the dark background.

Fast forwarding another couple centuries, we find Carl Spitzweg’s Der Schmetterlinsjager (“The Butterfly Hunter,” 1840). Spitzweg was a German romanticist, but to me this painting looks more like a cartoon—and not a very German one at that. The butterflies are exotic and huge. The hunter’s net appears too small, and in his comical getup, one senses that he is unprepared to face the winged monsters before him. Is it just me, or does this guy look like a cross between Ebeneezer Scrooge and Waldo? This could be the cover of a New Yorker magazine–but I’m getting ahead of myself.

Less than a generation later, Dante Rossetti did his small part for the butterfly in Western art. Leave it to the Pre-Raphaelites, with their pre-Stevie Nick-era love of diaphanous gowns, long haired vixens, and men on white horses, to work a butterfly into the scenery. Rossetti gave us Venus Verticordia (“The Heart Turner,” 1864-68), in which butterflies serve as an adornment for the hair of this lovely lass. She hardly needs them, what with those scarlett tresses, those luscious lips, and that unclothed body. . . . 

A couple of years after Rossetti painted his Venus, John Le Farge created Butterflies and Foliage (1889), a work you’d swear was by Louis Comfort Tiffany. I love this because this is exactly why stained glass was invented; nothing else can give such color to the magic of nature in a man-made art form. Le Farge was American, part of the Newport, Rhode Island hoi polloi, only rather than whiling his days away in the towns many mansions, he made their world better through his paintings and contributions to stained glass. I love how the work lacks a center focus. It has no anchor, which makes the butterflies seem as scattered and haphazard as they are in real life, an echo of the Asian nature scenes from a thousand years earlier. Bravo, Le Farge, for a bit of realism in your cut glass that doesn’t involve robed apostles.

Here’s a butterfly that has entered popular culture: Rea Irvin’s Eustace Tilley, which was the first cover of the New Yorker magazine on February 21, 1925, and who is memorialized every anniversary issue with an homage in which Eustace, possibly updated, regards a similar flying creature, itself possibly updated. The original scribbled butterfly is regarded warily through the dandy’s monocle, as if something so ordinary—something so peculiarly natural—is a rarity in the urban jungle of Manhattan.

In 1956, Salvador Dali did what he could to rectify the lack of butterflies in art with his Untitled (Landscape and Butterflies). In the realm of surrealism, this work is comforting rather than jolting. The butterflies are realistically depicted, and the landscape is devoid of the types of incongruous objects often found in his work. We can focus on the butterflies shapes, colors, and shadows on the desert-like environment, a hot, sandy, rocky outpost that doesn’t have anywhere for these butterflies to get a cold drink! The stark shadows indicate blinding sun, and yet these fragile creatures thrive. Who knows what it all means–at least Dali’s not accosting us with frightening images of Gala for a change.

Picasso, that whore of art, whipped up his own stylized fluttering creature in Le Papillon (“The Butterfly”), which very much in the vein of his Peace Dove. Light and lovely, a cartoon to lift one’s spirits on a harsh day. Perfect for a greeting card. That sly marketing genius.

Peter Max, God bless his technicolor soul, was one of the artists of the psychedelic era who made drug-tinged images palatable to the squares who listened to no music more threatening than Herb Alpert. His Butterfly (1969) reeks of hippie love and lettin’ it all hang out. It’s a good girl’s LSD trip, without a hangover or a flashback. It’s comforting in it’s baby-proofed curved edges and amorphous blobs that crescendo into a central face flanked by two profile pics. Groovy, man.

Alas, in the annals of butterfly art, the genre has one piece de resistance: Damien Hirst’s I Am Become Death, Shatterer of Worlds. This piece from 2006 is made from 9,000 dead butterflies. I love it—not only is it a beautiful mandala, it was also controversial. Hirst got lots of flak for killing so many butterflies, but what he has done is created a work of art out of a hobby—lepidoptery is a time honored tradition that goes back hundreds of years and was a major pastime for the Victorians who didn’t have HBO. It was also Vladimir Nabokov’s career before he started writing Lolita.

(These are not from the same work; the 2006 show had several works in it–all are spectacular.)

But, dear reader, these are all the butterflies I can find. Two thousand years of Western art history, and these are all the butterflies we have? It’s a travesty and oversight of the most picture-friendly creatures in the kingdom. Leonardo da Vinci never created a butterfly flying machine. Georgia O’Keeffe never painted a butterfly. Ansel Adams never photographed a butterfly. Michelangelo, Fra Angelico, Raphael, Monet, Seurat, Degas, Delacroix, Rembrandt, Van Gogh, total butterflies = 0. Even John James Audubon ignored the fantastic creatures when he compiled his treatise on birds. Of all the insects worthy of respect from artists, it seems butterflies get the least.

Maybe, just maybe, this phenomenon is reflects the fact that the butterfly, or rather all members of order Lepidoptera, are creatures so exquisite that they cannot be adequately captured by us mere mortals. The wise artist is she who knows not to try to improve on Mother Nature.