Monty Python foot pinched from National Gallery work

IT IS possibly the most famous foot in modern screen history as it stamps down twice during the opening credits of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Now, it has been revealed that its inspiration is a 16th-century painting in the National Gallery.

“In the late Sixties I would come to the gallery to steal ideas – some from paintings and through buying posters and souvenirs of characters I liked,” said

Monty Python member Terry Gilliam. “I then went home to create wonderfully silly animations.”

In a documentary film to celebrate the gallery’s 200th anniversary, which falls this weekend, Gilliam told how Bronzino’s Allegory with Venus, Cupid and Folly led to his creation of the descending bare foot. Gilliam, who later directed films including Brazil and 12

Monkeys, had noticed Cupid and a dove in a bottom corner of the painting.

“It seemed like his foot was about to crush the unsuspecting bird. I thought it 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,” he told The Telegraph.

Gilliam is one of 16 people – some celebrities, others gallery employees and the general public – who discuss their favourite painting in My National

Gallery, which will be released in about 300 cinemas in June.

In the film, Claudia Winkleman, presenter of Strictly Come Dancing, Trait o rs and The Piano, told how as a youngster she was taken each weekend by her father, Barry.

She said: “But we would only look at one painting each visit and for about 40 minutes. We would then come back next week, and so on.”

Princess Eugenie, younger daughter of the Duke and Duchess of York, chose Correggio’s Madonna of the Basket.

The Princess, now working at a Mayfair gallery, relates to “a mother looking after her young child, and struggling to put on its jacket”. She added: “I’ve recently had a second baby and know that feeling.”

Michael Palin, Gilliam’s former colleague, chose Turner’s Rain, Steam and

Speed. The presenter of the BBC TV series Great Railway Journeys said: “It shows the birth of the railways, yet Turner is also depicting the countryside, counterbalanced by the train.”

For children’s writer Jacqueline Wilson, it was the Impressionists who attracted her when taken as a youngster by her father. She said: “Especially Renoir’s The Umbrellas. Such a joyful work. I’ve also long identified with one young woman in the painting, who seems rather working class and has red hair. Many years later, I created Hetty Feather, who had a similar social status.”

Being taken as a child was mentioned by six of the 16 interviewees. “It is such a formative experience,” said Ali Ray, the film’s co-director. “All the more with so many secondary schools no longer taking their pupils, and far fewer able to study art history.”

For Peter Murphy, born in Liverpool and now a London-based piano teacher, a visit to the gallery changed his life. He suffered from a serious drink and drugs problem in the 1990s and 0000s while working on Channel 4’s Eurotrash.

In 2009, after a visit to Narcotics Anonymous in Soho, Murphy popped into the National Gallery. “I’d been before but this time I found myself drawn to a blue coloured painting. It was Bellini’s Madonna of the Meadow.”

Murphy then journeyed daily for more than 12 months to see the painting. It helped him off drink and drugs.

“The painting gives me inner peace ... I just feel I belong here,” he said.

Famous opening credits animation inspired by a 16th-century painting, Terry Gilliam reveals

‘I thought it 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’