SmartNews Keeping you current

One Italian Director Animated These Old Masterpieces With New Technology

We can’t decide if these moving paintings are cool or totally creepy

By Colin Schultz

smithsonian.com
January 21, 2014

A particularly stunning form of modern photography is the cinemagraph, a blend between a video and a photograph that captures a flicker of accenting motion against a still background.

For his video above, BEAUTY, Italian director Rino Stefano Tagliafierro took the idea of the cinemagraph and traveled back in time. Working with a large list of paintings, from masters such as Caravaggio and Rubens and Bouguereau, Tagliafierro worked to animate the artworks ex post facto.

The result of Tagliafierro's tinkering is both moving and—at times—a little creepy. It might be best described as a beautiful rendition of the uncanny valley.

H/T Open Culture

We Recommend

The Hagfish Is the Slimy Sea Creature of Your Nightmares (3:00)

The hagfish is a slime-emitting ocean-dweller that's remained unchanged for 300 million years--and it shows. It has a skull (but no spine), velvet smooth skin, and a terrifying pit of a mouth that's lined with rows of razor-sharp teeth.