The Mona Lisa dials a takeaway pizza

Introducing Rakewell, Apollo’s wandering eye on the art world. Look out for regular posts taking a rakish perspective on art and museum stories.

If ever you’ve felt that the masterpieces of the Renaissance could be improved with the addition of a layer of mozzarella and liberal sprinkling of premium pepperoni products, Rakewell has some encouraging news. In a new marketing gimmick for its questionably titled ‘Authentic Italian’ menu, Pizza delivery chain Domino’s has decided to redecorate selected UK branches in tribute to masters including Leonardo, Michelangelo and Caravaggio.

Domino’s Pizza Group Limited

While reproductions of works from the Italian renaissance grace the walls of trattorias across the land, the works commissioned by Domino’s go one further, incorporating discs of dough into some of the most famous images in art history.

Created by artist China Jordan, the pizza paintings include the Mona Lisa, The Creation of Adam and The Birth of Venus. ‘Reimagining and recreating the work of Michelangelo and Leonardo Da Vinci has naturally been challenging – and painting pizza into pictures is certainly a first for me – but I hope my paintings or “masterpizzas” can raise a smile in the pizz-art galleries around the country’, Jordan explains. ‘Italy is known as the birthplace of both renaissance art and pizza so perhaps it’s only natural that the two would be fused together at some point’. ‘Natural’ may be one thing, the Rake suggests – but ‘necessary’ is quite another.

Still, Domino’s isn’t the first institution to conflate the humble pizza with the upper echelons of human achievement. As regular readers will remember, UNESCO recently elevated traditional Neapolitan pizza to its list of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. So, if ever you find yourself hungry for high culture and saturated fat, you know where to get your fill.

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