I love classic nudes. I do! I love to look at classic nudes and see women. Sometimes disproportionate and anatomically dubious women, but still recognizable with the curves and changes that occur in most adult women. Particularly as a fat woman, I like that once upon a time a woman didn’t need to be all hard lines and planes in order to be deemed beautiful and picturesque. And that doesn’t mean they had to be fat either. They were simply natural.

from Wikipedia Venus Anadyomene by Titian

That image is seriously beautiful. If I looked like that, I think I would be pretty pleased what I had going on under my t-shirt. However, artist, model, and actress Anna Utopia Giordano concluded that she could do it one better by taking photoshop to classic nudes and skinny them up. The quote that made me go from RAGE QUIT to RAGE BLOG was:

‘Art is always in search of the perfect physical form,’ Giordano 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.’

You can see more of these in the Daily News link above, but to give you an idea of the “athletic” aesthetic that Giordano is implying as the more “perfect physical form” she’s given to these classic nudes:

Original by Velazquez	Photoshopped by Giordano

Original by Westal Richard	Photoshopped by Giordano

I’m pretty sure they’re still rockin’ the “Twiggy” look there, Giordano.

On Facebook a couple of my art friends pointed out the photoshop was bad and what Giordano does to anatomy with these pieces is criminal — I defer to their expertise on that front. My rage is almost exclusively at the message in these photoshopped pieces.

The original pieces are not only beautiful, but they show us women that have our shapes being portrayed like goddesses. Their thighs and buttocks and stomachs can be round and heavy. They can have creases and wrinkles. Their breasts varied in size. Women were thin and fat. These pieces may as well be a beacon: “Look, women have looked like you for centuries.”

Giordano gets her hands on a copy Photoshop and says, “These are outdated and don’t reflect modern beauty. Let me fix that for you, renowned artists.” And she removes the things that made these look like women — in that they had a unique shape and mystique to them. She looks at this beauty and concludes that it’s somehow inadequate.

Have you ever watched Nip/Tuck? If so, you’ve probably seen the classic scene in the beginning of the series where McMahon’s character uses a tube of lipstick to show a woman all the things he would have to change about her body to make her a “perfect ten.” This is absolutely no better, and it’s just as disgusting.

Taking digital scissors to classic nudes may as well be taking actual
scissors to real women — it sends pretty much the same message. Because what this says is that there’s only one beauty, and it better be lean and clean and tighten up those “properous” bits already.