Lauren Wade's Photoshopped Paintings and Changing Beauty Ideals

In May 2014, TakePart senior photo editor Lauren Wade opened eight famous paintings of women in Photoshop and gave each figure the kind of treatment a fashion photograph often gets before it reaches print. She narrowed waists, lifted busts, slimmed thighs and arms and smoothed skin, then turned every before-and-after pair into a short animated GIF. The series answers a simple question in a few seconds: the bodies that Titian, Botticelli, Goya and Modigliani chose to celebrate look nothing like the shape modern advertising presents as ordinary, and squeezing them into that shape takes far bigger edits than most people expect.

Wade's real subject was attention. Writing for TakePart, she said "I think it's crazy how much retouching people don't notice." On a glossy cover, a reshaped hip slips past us. Laid over a painting that millions of people already know by heart, the same change is impossible to miss. Below are all eight works, each with a note on what the painting is, where it can be seen and what the retouching alters, followed by what research says about edited images and body image, and how some governments now ask advertisers to label them.

Why a photo editor retouched the old masters

Wade worked with images every day, and her point was that retouching has become so routine that it is almost invisible. Fashion and beauty pictures of models who are already very thin are routinely pushed further toward an "industry standard" body. Applying the same steps to oil paintings, pastels and tempera made the process visible again, because viewers can compare the edit with a version they trust.

She was not the first artist to try this. Around 2010, the Italian artist Anna Utopia Giordano made a project called Venus, in which she digitally slimmed famous painted nudes. Introducing it, she asked: "What would have happened if the aesthetic standard of our society had belonged to the collective unconscious of the great artists of the past?" Wade's GIFs took the idea a step further by letting the original and the edit trade places in front of the viewer.

A note on the images: these are classical works of art that include nudity, shown here as they hang in major public museums, alongside the altered versions.

The eight paintings, before and after

Titian, Danaë With Eros (1544)

Titian painted this canvas in the mid-1540s for Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, and it now belongs to the Museo di Capodimonte in Naples. The subject comes from Greek myth: Danaë, locked away by her father, is visited by Zeus in the form of a shower of gold. In Wade's edit, the soft belly and full thighs are pulled in, and the reclining body suddenly looks lighter on the sheets than Titian intended.

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Grande Odalisque (1814)

Napoleon's sister Caroline Murat, then Queen of Naples, commissioned this reclining figure in 1814; the painting is in the Louvre. It is a useful reminder that distortion is not new. Critics of Ingres's day complained that the woman's back had two or three vertebrae too many, and later anatomical analyses have counted even more. Wade's retouching adds a modern layer on top of Ingres's own idealisation by trimming the waist and the arm.

Edgar Degas, La Toilette (1884–86)

In the 1880s Degas returned again and again to women bathing, drying themselves and combing their hair, often in pastel. These scenes were deliberately unposed, as though seen through a half-open door, and the bodies are ordinary rather than heroic. Narrowing the back and hips, as the edit does, removes exactly the realism that made Degas's bathers so controversial in his time.

Raphael, Three Graces (1504–1505)

This tiny panel, only about 17 centimetres across, hangs in the Musée Condé at Chantilly in France. The three Graces were companions of Aphrodite in Greek myth, and Raphael shows them holding golden spheres usually read as the apples of the Hesperides. Wade's version slims the waists and opens gaps between the thighs, a detail that did not exist as a beauty marker in Raphael's world.

Paul Gauguin, Two Tahitian Women (1899)

Gauguin painted this work during his second stay in French Polynesia; it is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Today many viewers also read his Tahitian pictures through the lens of colonialism and of the way European men portrayed Pacific women. The retouched version thins the arms and torsos, which shows how an imported ideal can overwrite yet another set of bodies.

Francisco Goya, Nude Maja (1797–1800)

Goya's La maja desnuda, in the Prado in Madrid, is one of the earliest major Western paintings of a nude woman who is not a goddess or a figure from myth. It has a clothed twin, La maja vestida, and in 1815 the Spanish Inquisition called Goya to explain the pair. The edit narrows her waist and hips, turning a frank, direct portrait into something closer to a lingerie advertisement.

Sandro Botticelli, Birth of Venus (1486)

Botticelli's goddess arriving on a scallop shell is one of the best-known images in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. Her pose borrows from ancient statues of Venus covering herself, and Botticelli already stretched her neck and sloped her shoulders for grace. The retouched figure loses the rounded belly and thighs that Renaissance viewers associated with fertility and beauty.

Amedeo Modigliani, Nude Sitting on a Divan (1917)

Modigliani painted this seated nude, sometimes called La Belle Romaine, in Paris in 1917. That December, police closed his only solo exhibition held during his lifetime, at Berthe Weill's gallery, because nudes were visible from the street. Wade's edit slims the waist and upper arms, yet the long neck and mask-like face, already far from realism, stay exactly as Modigliani made them.

Beauty ideals have never stood still

A common reading of this series is that "in the past, women were larger and that was the ideal." That is only partly true. Painters were also idealising: Ingres stretched a spine, Botticelli lengthened a neck, Modigliani elongated almost everything. A painted nude tells us what one artist, patron or period wanted to see, not what an average woman of that era looked like.

What the GIFs show well is that ideals move. Fashion history is full of examples, from the boyish silhouettes popularised in the 1920s to the curvier film stars of the 1950s and the very thin runway look of the 1990s. What changed in the digital era is the tool. A painter needed years of skill to adjust a figure; a retoucher can reshape a body in minutes, and the result is presented as a photograph, a medium people tend to trust as a record of reality.

What research says about edited images and body image

The concern behind Wade's project is backed by a large body of research. A 2008 meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin by Shelly Grabe, L. Monique Ward and Janet Hyde combined 77 studies with more than 15,000 participants. It found that exposure to media featuring very thin actresses and models was linked to greater body dissatisfaction among women and to more unhealthy eating habits such as excessive dieting. Interestingly, studies from the 2000s showed a larger average effect than those from the 1990s.

Effects in single studies are usually modest, and people respond differently depending on age, mood and how much they compare themselves with others. Still, the pattern is consistent enough that psychologists treat repeated exposure to idealised, edited bodies as one of several real influences on how people feel about their own. If you notice that certain feeds or magazines leave you feeling worse about your body, it is reasonable to step back from them, and anyone struggling with eating or body image should talk to a doctor.

Labels and laws for retouched photos

Some governments now ask advertisers to say when a body has been altered. In France, a decree published in May 2017 took effect on 1 October 2017. It requires commercial photographs in which a model's figure has been changed by image-editing software to carry the words "photographie retouchée" ("retouched photograph"). The rule covers posters, print, online and direct advertising but not television, and fines can reach 37,500 euros, or up to 30 percent of the cost of the non-compliant campaign.

Labels do not stop editing, and researchers are still debating how much they change the way viewers feel. They do support Wade's central message: people deserve to know when the body in front of them was built with software.

Looking at the series today

More than a decade later, the tools have only become easier. Phone apps and filters can slim a face or a waist in real time, so the gap between a picture and a person is wider than ever. Wade's eight GIFs remain a clear, quick way to talk about that gap with friends, students or children: look at the original, look at the edit, and ask who decided which one counts as beautiful.

Sources: Retouched GIFs created by Lauren Wade for TakePart (May 2014); designboom: Lauren Wade imagines famous paintings photoshopped like fashion models; Medical University of Warsaw, Anatomical Theatre: Ingres, Grande Odalisque; ScienceDaily: media images and women's body image (2008); Osborne Clarke: France's retouched photograph label (2017).

Related:

• A Retouching Video Questions Advertising’s Beauty Standards
• Composite Faces Labelled by Country: What an Average Image Represents
• Twenty-Nine Social Satire Illustrations by Paweł Kuczyński
• Dušan Krtolica’s Childhood Drawings of Animals and Imagined Worlds
• 12 Year Old Girl Paints Heaven, Child Prodigy [VIDEO]
• Every Week, 2 Anonymous Students Sneak Into A Classroom And Proceed To Blow Everyone's Mind