The Renaissance lives!

The Great American Corporation has many herd instincts, including mind-numbing group get-togethers and a love of flying that probably accounts for $100 per barrel of oil. Two of the many things I am delighted not to have to do, having left this kind of organization years ago.

However, I got a haunting reminder of those horrid days a couple of months ago when Delta Airlines’s computer mailed me a reminder that my remaining 12,000 miles of frequent flier time- and oil-wasting miles were about to expire. Well, 12k gets you nothing other than magazine subscriptions, so I signed up for a bunch. Who knows, the advertisements may provide fodder for photographic ideas.

As I was shaving this morning, and idly flicking through the pages of one of these (my mailman probably hates me as I got a dozen subscriptions, all told!), I came across a real corker. A double-page ad In ‘Men’s Vogue’ for the aptly named Renaissance Hotels (Marriott) which is nothing more or less than a very amusing recreation of Raphael’s ‘School of Athens’.

Here’s the original:

Raphael. School of Athens. 1511. Papal Rooms, Vatican

And here’s the advertisement which I stitched together as best as I could in PS CS2:

Advertisement for Renaissance Hotels, 2008. Artist unknown.

The brooding figure slumped at the desk (Heraclitus acted by Michelangelo) has been replaced with the slumped businessman (another victim of frequent flying), Diogenes (to the right on the steps) has become a young woman clutching a cellphone. Plato (Leonardo) and Aristotle, entering through the portal, have morphed into pair of amoral (is there any other kind?) lawyers. The floor inlays in the foreground are identical. The boy on the far right is delivering tax deductible booze at the taxpayers’ expense.

And so on.

Great fun and thanks Renaissance Hotels. Maybe next time you would like to actually credit the team which made this fabulous recreation?

More information about who-is-who in the Raphael can be found here.