Accidental Renaissance

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About

Accidental Renaissance refers to a series of modern photographs that happen to be composed in the same way as art associated with the Renaissance.

Origin

The earliest known example of Accidental Renaissance, in which a person pointed out the similarities between a modern photograph and Renaissance art, occurred on August 2nd, 2014. That day, Facebook user Manzil Lajura^[1] posted a series of three images featuring a physical altercation in Ukrainian Parliament, which took place on July 22nd.^[5] In the first image, she posted a photo of the fight; the second, the same photo with the Golden Ratio imposed over the image; and in the third, the picture framed in a museum. Lagjur captioned the post "Pelea en el parlamento Ucraniano convertido en arte renacentista ^^," which translates to "Fight in the Ukrainian Parliament become Renaissance Art ^^." The image (shown below) received more than 246 likes and 880 shares.

Four days later, in an article about the photograph, the Guardian^[2] referred to the picture as "Accidental Renaissance."

Spread

While the Tweet has since been deleted, many articles from the August 2014 reference a post from Twitter user @jamesharveytm, which appears to bear some responsibility for helping the picture go viral. The tweet (shown below) was captioned "Someone took a candid photo of a fight in Ukrainian Parliament that is as well-composed as the best renaissance art."

Several news outlets covered the photograph, too, including The Guardian, Fast Company,^[3] Mashable,^[4] BuzzFeed^[6] and more.

On August 6th, other people started posting photographs that resembled Renaissance art. Twitter user @dan_sully^[7] posted a photo of three soccer players with the caption "Another renaissance painting is this picture of Lampard after he scored following the death of his mum." The post (shown below, left) received more than 200 retweets and 200 likes. Twitter user @PaulMac^[8] responded to the post with another soccer-related picture. They captioned the post (shown below, right) "@dan_sully @rosieswash and this one's like Caravaggio's Taking of the Christ."

The next day, on August 7th, Redditor openmindedskeptic launched the /r/AccidentalRenaissance subreddit.^[9] Within two years, the subreddit has amassed more than 222,000 subscribers.

On June 8th, 2017, Redditor mrwrdy^[10] posted the subreddit's most popular post, a photograph from former FBI Director James Comey's testimony regarding his firing by President Donald Trump. Within 24 hours, the image (shown below) had garnered more than 64,700 points (86% upvoted) and 1900 comments.