Mona Lisa now

By Frank Moraes

Giovanni Carmine, an art curator in Switzerland, had an interesting idea. It also turned out to be horrifying. He took a number depictions of women in great pieces of art throughout history and altered them into our modern standards of beauty. That is: he made them painfully skinny. We aren't talking here about Rubenesque models who we know to be plump. He took women who I'd always thought of as being pretty thin -- women like the model for Mona Lisa.

I recommend clicking over to the Ensemble Magazine article, "The Mona Lisa Retouched, According to the Ideal of Beauty Now." What really stands out is how sickly the women look compared to the originals. But if you look at the new imagines for a while, you soon see that they aren't distortions. They really are what the modern world thinks of as beautiful.

And that's why it is horrifying.

Note: the Mona Lisa above is probably the least horrific of the many examples.

(Cross-posted at Frankly Curious.)