Paintings by Caravaggio, Vermeer, & Other Great Masters Come to Life in a New Animated Video

With his short video “Beau­ty,” the Ital­ian direc­tor Rino Ste­fano Tagli­afier­ro takes “a series of well select­ed images from the tra­di­tion of pic­to­r­i­al beau­ty” and uses the “fire of dig­i­tal inven­tion” to ani­mate sen­ti­ments lost on immo­bile can­vass­es. In the video above, you will see works by Car­avag­gio, Ver­meer, Rubens and oth­ers put into dig­i­tal motion. A com­plete list of the paint­ings includ­ed in the video can be found here. Plus there’s a tum­blr with ani­mat­ed GIFs of the paint­ings.  Find more infor­ma­tion, includ­ing a man­i­festo for the video (in Ital­ian), on Tagli­afier­ro’s web site. An Eng­lish trans­la­tion of the man­i­festo appears below the jump.

via Digg

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Devour­ing Time, blunt thou the lion’s paws,
And make the earth devour her own sweet brood;
Pluck the keen teeth from the fierce tiger’s jaws,
And burn the long-lived phoenix in her blood;
Over Beau­ty, there has always hung the cloud of des­tiny and all-devour­ing time.
Beau­ty has been invoked, re-fig­ured and described since antiq­ui­ty as a fleet­ing moment of hap­pi­ness and the inex­haustible full­ness of life, doomed from the start to a redemp­tive yet trag­ic end.
In this inter­pre­ta­tion by Rino Ste­fano Tagli­afier­ro, this beau­ty is brought back to the expres­sive force of ges­tures that he springs from the immo­bil­i­ty of can­vas, ani­mat­ing a sen­ti­ment lost to the fixed­ness mas­ter­pieces.
Its as though these images which the his­to­ry of art has con­signed to us as frozen move­ment can today come back to life thanks to the fire of dig­i­tal inven­tion.
A series of well select­ed images from the tra­di­tion of pic­to­r­i­al beau­ty are appro­pri­at­ed, (from the renais­sance to the sym­bol­ism of the late 1800s, through Man­ner­ism, Pas­toral­ism, Roman­ti­cism and Neo-clas­si­cism) with the inten­tion of retrac­ing the sen­ti­ment beneath the veil of appear­ance.
An inspi­ra­tion that returns to us the sense of one fall­en, and the exis­ten­tial brevi­ty that the author inter­prets as trag­ic dig­ni­ty, with an unen­chant­ed eye able to cap­ture the pro­found­est sense of the image.
Beau­ty in this inter­pre­ta­tion is the silent com­pan­ion of Life , inex­orably lead­ing from the smile of the baby, through erot­ic ecstasies to the gri­maces of pain that close a cycle des­tined to repeat ad infini­tum.
They are, from the incep­tion of a roman­tic sun­rise in which big black birds fly to the final sun­set beyond goth­ic ruins that com­plete the piece, a work of fleet­ing time.