In the first season of Monty Python’s Flying Circus (1969), the British cult comedy, John Cleese and Graham Chapman visit London’s National Gallery. Dressed as frumpy mothers, they satisfy their hunger for art by taking bites out of J.M.W. Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire (1839). “I never used to much like Turner,” Chapman says while nibbling on the titular warship.

Though part of a broader shtick in the series that sends up art world pretensions, Monty Python’s art director, Terry Gilliam, had in fact drawn inspiration from a painting hanging on the walls of the very same museum. That work is Agnolo Bronzino’s An Allegory with Venus and Cupid (1545), which might seem surprising, since the Surrealism of Salvador Dalí and Max Ernst or the absurdity of the Dadaists might seem like more obvious sources of inspiration.

The full Monty Python gang in a Los Angeles elevator. Photo: Ben Martin/Getty Images.

As Gilliam tells it, he often trawled through London galleries in the late 1960s looking for references to inform the comedy troupe’s aesthetic stylings. On occasion, he’d buy posters and souvenirs of characters who stood out and then turn them into bizarro animations back at home.

One day at the National Gallery, he encountered the 16th-century Mannerist painting alongside works by Michelangelo and Raphael. While the eroticism between Venus and her son is arresting (so too Deception, the part-woman-part-serpent goddess), what caught Gilliam’s eye was Cupid’s foot, in the painting’s lower left corner. In particular, he noted the odd perspective that makes it appear as though the Roman god of love is on the verge of trampling a dove.

Agnolo Bronzino, Venus, Cupid, Folly, and Time (c. 1545) (detail). Photo: VCG Wilson / Corbis via Getty Images.

The foot, of course, would become a recurring feature of Monty Python’s opening credits. At the end of the opening sequence of every episode, Cupid’s foot appears and abruptly destroys all beneath it. The foot’s victims include a man with flowers on his head, a flying chicken, and the Monty Python title card. The arrival of the foot is each time accompanied by the sound of farting.

The stamping foot appears in the opening credits of every episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Photo: Screenshot.

“It seemed like his foot was about to crush the unsuspecting bird,” Gilliam said in an interview with the Daily Telegraph, discussing his favorite painting. “I thought the foot would make a lovely punctuation, a sudden halt to what was going on. Cupid’s foot made it even better because what better than to be crushed by love.”

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