Improving Aphrodite

At work, I was flipping through catalogs of fine-art reproductions, admiring the good ones, and groaning over the poor ones, when I noticed a trend that stopped me and sent me furiously turning pages back, saying "oh my god! Look what they're doing!"

Here, let me show you.

This is a resin model one can buy of the "Venus with Apple" in the Thorvaldsen Museum in Copenhagen:




Look familiar? Not quite?

Here's another, from Botticelli's "Birth of Venus" (one of my personal pet peeves is when companies take paintings--2 dimensional art--and turn them into models, 3D, as if the painter really was trying to express themselves in sculpture, he just didn't have the right materials, or something....but I'll try to put that aside for the moment.)



Okay, these are hideous reproductions any way you look at it, I admit. But WHAT HAVE THEY DONE TO VENUS, the !@#$&! Goddess of BEAUTY, for crying out loud?

( Here, have a look at the originals. )