A new advertising campaign by Renaissance Hotels has been catching our eye lately. Capitalizing on their name, the chain has produced a series of ads modeled on famous Italian Renaissance paintings.
Above, a model stands poolside in precisely the position assumed by Venus in Botticelli’s Birth of Venus (see below) as flowers shower down from the sky. In the original painting, the goddess newly-born from the sea is flanked on the left by Zephyrs and on the right by one of the Horae, a goddess of the seasons.
In the Renaissance ad above, the Zephyrs are replaced by smartly uniformed and diligent hotel employees who offer their almost-divine guest a refreshing cocktail and a carefully-composed plate of snacks, while the Hora who cloaks Venus below becomes an attentive pool boy offering a soft and fluffy towel.
The ad campaign is not just one of Renaissance imitation, however. The recomposed scenes incorporate elements of real Renaissance hotels. The pool, for example, in the Botticelli-esque ad at the top of this post is inspired by the swimming pool at the Renaissance Orlando Resort at Seaworld. Similarly, the loggia in the background was inspired by the arches on the facade of the Renaissance Hamburg Hotel.
Similarly, the vaults that cover the Last Supper-esque version of the ad campaign (below) are derived from the ceiling of the Renaissance Cleveland Hotel in Ohio, while the marble floor in the same image is an invention upon that found in the Renaissance Beijing Hotel.
The ad campaign is in print, but there’s an interactive web version as well, in which clickable “fireflies” occupy parts of the images and provide more information about amenities offered by the hotel chain.
And there’s a third image - perhaps the cleverest of them all - that seems to be available only in print (seen most recently in December issues of the New Yorker). It’s an evocative adaptation of Raphael’s School of Athens, in which hotel guests have artfully arranged themselves in a majestic hotel lobby, assuming the positions of philosophers and thinkers featured in Raphael’s original composition. Anybody have a web version of that particular ad? We’d love a copy.
