Distinguished Portraits are digital interventions of historical portrait paintings. They are digital works. I cover the protagonists faces using naturalistic elements. Taking into account the special characteristics of the painting, I transform the individual identities of the painting itself. I replace the original human features with the ones of fruits or plants, by doing so I try to incorporate a contemporary discourse on nature and society into historical paintings. The Distinguished Portraits are a contemporary view on art history introducing a simple question to the equation, what if nature would have been at the centre of our conversations throughout history? By giving a human resemblance to nature’s elements I want to debate the anthropocentric view of our current society underlining the importance of plants in our everyday life. The experiments serve as reminder of a simple fact, plants account up to 85% of the biomass present on planet earth, we, the humans including the animals, represent only the 0.3% (source “La pianta del mondo” by Stefano Mancuso). Maybe we could reconsider our importance and priorities in the world.




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Original paintings
Arciduca Ferdinando Massimiliano I by Winterhalter Franz Xavier, 1857
Admiral Horatio Nelson by John Francis Rigaud, 1781
Madame X by John Singer Sargent, 1884
Henry VIII by Hans Holbein, 1543
Pope Pio VI by Pompeo Batoni, 1804
Marie Antoinette by Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, 1783


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