Why we persist in calling modern photos 'Renaissance paintings' online

A group of Olympians who’ve collapsed while crossing the finish line. Pop stars dancing in ecstasy. The array of films, seen from another row of seats, watched on an airplane. On X, these photos are all dubbed “Renaissance paintings” due to their varying degrees of resemblance to the work of 15th century Italian masters like Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, and Michelangelo. 

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The European cultural movement first became shorthand online a decade ago, when images of a physical fight in the Ukranian parliament, a somewhat common occurrence, circulated. One of the images bore a striking adherence to the Ancient Greek mathematical art theory further developed in the Renaissance by da Vinci and mathematician Luca Pacioli, which used the “Golden ratio” and “Fibonacci spiral” to create the most satisfying composition. Users dubbed it “accidental Renaissance,” and the phrase stuck in our meme-y vocabulary, changing the way we understood images online. 

On Reddit, over a million people belong to r/AccidentalRenaissance, a community devoted to sharing images that they feel have a resemblance to the paintings of the period. 

Matthias Wivel, head of research at the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek art museum in Copenhagen, Denmark, and previously the National Museum’s curator of 16th-century Italian paintings, described the Ukrainian parliament image as “remarkable” and “quite perfect.” He notes, however, that it’s more akin to a Roman Baroque painting, the period directly following the Renaissance, due to its complex, interlocking postures and incidental mastery of visual language developed during the former period — specifically, the value placed on rich symbolism and continuous narrative across multiple figures within the frame.

As with most internet trends, “accidental Renaissance” is no longer used to describe photographs that are decisively similar to the movement’s work. Once something is part of the online vernacular, its use resonates and gains traction despite its meaning changing throughout the repetitive process. Now, seemingly any image featuring multiple figures could receive the title.

“People use ‘Renaissance painting’ as kind of a shorthand for an image capturing a group of people who are compositionally interesting.”

When a pop culture aggregate account captioned an image of Charli XCX dancing with Lorde at the brat singer’s birthday party, “this is like a modern renaissance painting,” James Webster, a 31-year-old web marketing assistant at Seven Stories Press in Texas, shot back with a meme. He manipulated a dril post to read, “(me after seeing 3+ people in any context whatsoever) Well well well if isnt the Renaissance painting.” The post received 83,000 likes, 20,000 more than the photo. 

The post and the popularity of its retort signaled the meme’s ubiquity and perceived distance from what defined Renaissance paintings. It suggests the Renaissance becoming a meme outside of the historical cultural movement.

“It clicked in my mind that people use ‘Renaissance painting’ as kind of a shorthand for an image capturing a group of people who are compositionally interesting,” Webster told Mashable. 

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However, Wivel understands why people still use the term. “Most people don’t know much about art history, but they’ve heard of the Renaissance and know it’s an era of classical painting,” he said. 

It’s also a pivotal moment in art history and the history of Western culture that’s reiterated in history classes and at museums around the world. Da Vinci’s The Mona Lisa gets 10 million visitors a year in the Louvre, making it the most visited painting in the world. Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling panel The Creation of Adam has been spoofed in popular culture a hundred times over. Thousands cram themselves in front of Raphael’s The School of Athens every day in the Vatican.

Many of the characteristics of the Renaissance that these images hint at, like the rational organization of figures in space and psychological realism, were developed during the period. Given that that’s when the characteristics emerged, Wivel argues, the descriptor makes sense.

These developments are most notably articulated in da Vinci’s The Last Supper, which is likely the central reference point for posters as one of the most famous images of all time. “You have Christ in the middle with the apostles around him. It’s just as he announces that one of them is going to betray him, you see his words reverberating in all they all respond to it,” explains Wivel. “So there’s a psychological intertwinement of all the figures in that image. Leonardo’s great goal is to show not just the physical presence of humans, but also the mental presence.”

Jerry Brotton, professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary University of London and author of Four Points of the Compass: The Unexpected History of Direction, also cited The Last Supper as a demonstration of the emotions we associate with the Renaissance. 

“Revelation, calmness, thoughtfulness, guilt, terror, horror, it’s all laid out there at a dinner table,” he told Mashable. “Those images that are captured now through social media are doing something similar. They are trying to capture a certain composition or moment which is about pain, ecstasy, joy, and/or horror.”

With the range of emotions and sculpted bodies on display — another defining aspect of the Renaissance — at the 2024 Paris Olympics, many so-called Renaissance paintings circulated on social media. 

The image of the four-by-400-meter relay race that got the descriptor displayed members of Team Great Britain. One lies on his back, another bent over him. Beside him is another runner with a face of shock and hands almost held in prayer, and the final member of the team keeps his hands over his head. In a Renaissance painting, these emotions would be assumed as driven by religious beliefs — and despair featured heavily. Wivel likened the image to a painting of a lamentation over the dead body of Christ, a popular scene for artists known as the Pietà, rendered by masters from Michelangelo to Pietro Perugino and Giovanni Bellini.

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Emma Turner, a 24-year-old working in sports media in Brisbane, Australia, posted a photo of her TV displaying the men’s triathlon finish line with the caption, “obsessed with the finish line in the men’s triathlon, it’s like a renaissance piece” to X. The photo showed one athlete lying on his back and another on his hands and knees. 

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The response to the meme and its recirculation on Facebook and Instagram surprised her. She received comments like, “People are just calling anything a Renaissance painting these days.”

“With modern phrases and pop culture, it’s just become a shorthand for people to say this is beautiful or this is something that came together in a way that is appealing to the human eye, in the way that classical art is,” she told Mashable.

Despite the loosening of what “Renaissance painting” means in reference to viral images, it’s no accident that, again and again, we find ourselves attracted to these images of extreme emotion and beautiful bodies. We may no longer be living in the time of da Vinci, Raphael, and Michelangelo, but we’re still appreciators of art, whether that be murals or memes.