69 History And Classical Art Memes For People Who Prefer Their Humor With A Little Bit Of Culture On Top

The reason many of these Renaissance paintings translate so effortlessly into memes is that the artists were never really painting theology. They were painting people. Real people, hired from the streets and markets of Florence and Rome, were brought in to pose as saints and angels and biblical figures and told to hold an expression while someone spent weeks rendering it in extraordinary detail.

Nobody understood this more radically than Caravaggio, the ultimate chaos agent of the late Renaissance, who made it his entire mission to drag the divine down to street level. While his contemporaries were painting luminous, idealized saints with perfect skin and heavenly composure, Caravaggio was walking down to the Tiber River recruiting adult workers and tavern brawlers to pose as holy figures, and the Church was absolutely horrified by it.

His 1606 masterpiece depicting the end of the Virgin Mary’s life is the most notorious example. Commissioned as an altarpiece for a Carmelite church in Rome, it depicted the Virgin Mary as a woman who had just come to the end of her life, with bloated legs, a swollen belly, bare, dirty feet, and the unmistakable face of Maddalena Antognetti, a well-known local adult worker rumored to be Caravaggio's lover.

The monks who commissioned it took one look at the finished painting, recognized Lena immediately, and refused to hang it. The parishioners had also recognized her, which was arguably worse. The painting was rejected as vulgar and lacking in divinity. It is now considered one of the most important works in Western art history and lives in the Louvre.

The genre of art memes has been building quietly since at least 2010, when Tumblr started pairing classical paintings with modern captions and discovering that the combination worked at a frequency nobody had predicted. The format spread to Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, accumulating millions of followers across dozens of dedicated accounts.

An 18th-century self-portrait by French painter Joseph Ducreux went viral on 4chan and Reddit, and paired the painting with Old English or archaic translations of modern hip-hop lyrics. Pure art! "Who hath released the hounds?" has a particularly catchy ring to it.