Artist whips Venus into shape
Renaissance art slimmed down to prove point about standards of beauty
Does this century make me look fat?
That’s what Italian artist Anna Utopia Giordano probes in a project where’s she’s turned some of our classic female art icons into svelte models with figures found in modern fashion magazines.
On a loftier level it can be interpreted as showing that beauty is a moving target, with different ideals occurring at different times in different places.
“Art is always in search of the perfect physical form,” the artist says on her website. “It has evolved through history, from the classical proportions of ancient Greece, to the prosperous beauty of the Renaissance, to the spindly look of models like Twiggy and the athletic look of our own time.”
The collection, titled Venus, also shows how easy it has become for the fashion industry to manipulate photos — electronically shrinking this, enlarging those — creating artificial standards that critics say are too high for the average woman.
The familiar The Sleeping Venus painted by Artemisia Gentileschi, circa 1625, rests in contentment as what we might refer to today as a BBW (Big Beautiful Woman). But After Giordano’s electronic Photoshop scalpel does its work, the BBW is beach-ready with killer abs.
There are 10 comparisons in all, including Boticelli’s Birth of Venus and Venus and Cupid by Diego Velazquez.