Here at the Daily Dot, we swap GIF images with each other every morning. Now we’re looping you in. In the Morning GIF, we feature a popular—or just plain cool—GIF we found on Reddit, Canvas, or elsewhere on the Internet.
Artist Anna Utopia Giordano has taken some of the greatest paintings of Venus, goddess of love, and re-imagined them as slenderized 21st century icons of the female form.
The transformation is, in a word, heavy.
Shaving hips, thighs, bellies, and about 30 lbs off each classic Venus, from the 15th Century to the 19th, Giordano demonstrates the distorted view of the female form unique to this moment in time. The Guardian has a slideshow, and you can see them all on the artist’s site, but a slideshow can’t shock the way a GIF can, transforming before your eyes from an image of voluptuous languor to what appears to be enervated faintness.
The blogger at Symmetrism has GIF’d most of the Venuses in the series to startling effect.
So far, 24,161 people have checked out, reblogged, and/or liked these “makeovers.” We’ve chosen Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, often called the most beautiful representation of the unselfconscious female form in Western art, for our example.
