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The Italian tourism ministry thought it had a sure-fire way to bring travelers into the country: turning a 15th-century art icon into a 21st-century “virtual influencer.”
The digital rendition of Venus, goddess of love, based on Sandro Botticelli’s Renaissance masterpiece “Birth of Venus,” can be seen noshing on pizza and snapping selfies for her Instagram page. Unlike the original, this Venus is fully clothed. The influencer claims to be 30, or “maybe just a wee bit (older) than that.”
But the new ad campaign is facing significant backlash — with critics calling it a “new Barbie” that trashes Italy’s cultural heritage.
The tourist campaign “trivializes our heritage in the most vulgar way, transforming Botticelli’s Venus into yet another stereotyped female beauty,” Livia Garomersini, an art historian and activist with Mi Riconosci, an art and heritage campaign organization, said in a response to the project.
The yearlong campaign, produced by national tourism agency ENIT and advertising group Armando Testa, is estimated to have cost 9 million euros (about $9.9 million), according to ENIT CEO Ivana Jelinic.
Jelinic said that the campaign was designed for overseas markets to attract younger tourists. The online Venus launched in Italy on April 20 and made her international debut in Dubai at the Arabian Travel Market.
The criticism extends beyond the use of a masterpiece to the manner in which the campaign was orchestrated, including its use of stock images and other gaffes like a promotional video featuring a winery in Slovenia, used as a stand-in for Italy.
Matteo Flora, a University of Pavia professor, said the campaign also wasted money. The campaign’s creative team chose to use the “intelligence of human creativity,” rather than artificial intelligence, to build the virtual Venus — but Flora showed how he could quickly come up with a similar campaign using AI at a cost of 20 euros. His social media posts have been shared by thousands of people.
The use of a likeness of Botticelli’s masterpiece has been lambasted by art historians as well, who say it vastly diminishes the beauty and mystery of the 15th-century original.
This article was provided by The Associated Press.