For Sale: A 19th-Century Portrait Painted on a Spiderweb

By the 16th century, these monks had developed a mastery of the laborious process of collecting cobwebs, washing them, then layering them on top of one another. Once the webs formed a milky, opaque surface, they would stretch them over mats to form their miniscule canvases, then grab their brushes. The resulting renditions of Catholic saints would have appeared to float like specters in cloister windows. The Chester Cathedral in England is home to one of the last such pieces of iconography: an image of the Virgin Mary holding the Christ child, painted by the Tyrolean artist Johann Burgman.

As the centuries crept by, secular subjects entered these ghostly frames. Mobley speculates that the figure in her painting was an Austrian military man from his uniform. Dukes, duchesses, and other members of society who were wealthy enough to afford a portrait are common subjects, along with landscapes and pastoral scenes.

Franz Unterberger, the artist who signed this particular work, played an outsized role in popularizing these curiosities. Although an accomplished oil painter, Unterberger most likely did not wield the brush here. Rather, he worked as an art dealer out of a shop in Tyrol, where he commissioned cobweb paintings from anonymous artists and sold them. His business continued into the 1930s, by which time the last artist with the knowledge of this enigmatic craft had passed away.