“Obviously, the dance between artists and advertisers is always difficult to figure out,” said comedian and expert native advertiser Scott Aukerman in an interview with Co.Create recently. Indeed, this uneasy relationship has been going on a long time. But when the Medici family bankrolled some of the greatest pieces of Renaissance art, they never asked for a Medici family logo on the canvas. A new Tumblr imagines how it might have gone if perhaps a sponsor like Nike had been around back then.





Created by art director Davide Bedoni, the Swoosh Art project takes recognizable paintings from the renaissance and beyond, and turns them into unabashed Nike ads. In each painting, the swoosh is inserted so that it is central to the action–sometimes even woven through the limbs of the painting’s subject. It obviously looks rather jarring to see art refurbished into ads, but this work of satire doesn’t seem beyond the realm of possibility. Lest we forget, a long-deceased Fred Astaire was once made to dance with a Dirt Devil during the Super Bowl, so anything is possible.

Have a look at more Swoosh Art in the slides above.

H/t to High Snobiety