Perception · 2 min read
Seeing Faces Everywhere: Pareidolia From Arcimboldo to Your Wallpaper
March 2026
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Two windows and a door become a surprised face. A cloud becomes a dog. A slice of toast becomes a portrait. Seeing faces where there are none has a name, pareidolia, and painters have played with it for centuries.
Your brain wants faces
Face pareidolia is the illusory perception of faces that do not exist.1 In a 2014 study titled, memorably, “Seeing Jesus in toast,” researchers showed volunteers images of pure visual noise, while telling them that half the images contained a hidden face or letter.1
The volunteers reported seeing faces in 34% of the noise images. Brain scans showed a specific response in the right fusiform face area, a region involved in recognizing real faces.1
“Sensory input with even the slightest suggestion of a face can result in the interpretation of a face.”
Jiangang Liu and colleagues, Cortex, 2014
Arcimboldo's fruit faces
In the 16th century, the Milanese painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo built portraits out of fruits, vegetables, animals, books and other objects. A favorite court painter of the Habsburg emperors Maximilian II and Rudolf II in Prague, he loved illusionistic trickery, puns and jokes.2
His Summer and Winter sum up his eccentric vision.2 They work precisely because of pareidolia: you cannot stop seeing a face, even once you have identified every pear and every branch.
Four centuries later, these double images were greatly admired by Salvador Dalí and other Surrealist painters,2 the dream painters we met in the story of the 1924 manifesto.
Faces on your walls
Pareidolia happens at home too: knots in a wooden door, a pattern in the wallpaper, two sockets and a switch.
It is part of how we see pictures, like the eyes that seem to follow you in the Mona Lisa effect.
Play with it
Images that hide a face or an animal in clouds, rocks or trees are a joy in family rooms and children's corners: everyone sees something different.
They also make great conversation pieces in an entrance or a hallway.
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Look twice
Four canvases where landscapes become creatures.
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Read the storyNotes & sources
- Jiangang Liu et al., "Seeing Jesus in toast: neural and behavioral correlates of face pareidolia", Cortex, 2014 (abstract, PubMed 24583223). pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Giuseppe Arcimboldo". britannica.com