How would Venus look today? When painting is updated with Photoshop
Eyes bigger, lips fuller, tummy flatter, legs slimmer: The fact that the pictures of women who are beaming at us from billboards and glossy magazines, go through the beauty optimization machine before printing, is no longer a secret. The American photographer Lauren Wade works daily with Photoshop, filters and retouched - if subtle. But especially the small, fast everyday tasks are deceptive: "I find it crazy, how little people notice," writes Wade on the website TakePart. Even a supposedly natural picture is anything but that.
We also know for a long time that beauty ideals are subject to the changing times. But to show the extent of what the media world today praises as beautiful, Wade has subjected well-known paintings of art history to a Photoshop makeover. Until the naked muses of great painters such as Titian, Rubens or Gauguin meet today's standards: The much admired curves of Botticelli's Venus from 1486 give way to a narrow waist and plump breasts, the legs of Titian's Danaë are only half as full as 500 years ago. With her art project, Lauren Wade impressively demonstrates how far our concept of beauty has moved away from the reality of life over the centuries.
Titian's Portrait of the Zeus Lover Danaë from 1544
Paul Gauguin's two Tahitian women from 1899
