Flavorwire

In her Venus project, Italian artist Anna Utopia Giordano remixes some of the most celebrated nudes of art history, giving them an extreme Photoshop makeover. Essentially, she turns the icons of beauty of bygone centuries into the breasty waifs currently mass-marketed as ideal in today’s society. She asks, “What would have happened if the aesthetic standard of our society had belonged to the collective unconscious of the great artists of the past?” The results are stark and varied. While some ladies might be bettered by a tug at the waistline and pump to the bust, others may seem off and almost disturbingly adolescent. It makes us wonder if the girls of yesteryear — the ones with the skinny forms idolized by today’s fashion industry — would have stared up at the comparatively Rubenesque builds of the pin-ups of their day with envy. See the before-and-after takes side-by-side, and decide whether the digital lipo and breast augmentation was really necessary.

Image credit: Anna Utopia Giordano