He worked with a team of theater technicians -- Diana Ferri, who does costumes for opera productions; Paolo Manciochi, who does make-up and hair for the Opera House; and artist Isabella Bartoli, who created the props -- to get the material and aesthetic details exactly right.

The models were selected not for their looks but by matching their contributions to the city of Florence with those of the subject of the Renaissance-era painting. "Dre Love is Lorenzo because he has done more than any artist to integrate music, rhythm and fashion style from both his homes, New York and Florence," Abouzeid told me. And Abouzeid himself appears as Amerigo Vespucci because, like Vespucci, he has been an explorer, trekking to the North Pole in 2009.

Lighting, Abouzeid told me, often presented the biggest challenge. "Artists of the period embellished their paintings, adding light and shadow as we now would with Photoshop," he wrote. One particular painting was lit as though the planet had two suns. Even though the paintings were interpretations of a period before electric lighting, the team had to turn to modern theater lighting in order to achieve the same effect.

It is commonly observed that with the rise of photography, painters were let off the hook for documenting "reality," and thus in the 19th and 20th centuries they moved onto more abstract and impressionistic art. Leave reality to the photographers. But Abouzeid's "New, New World" inverts, or at least confuses, that divide. He has photographed (and printed) the paintings, and, in a sense, he has painted photographs, constructing his portraits before taking a shot. "Reality" isn't so much the domain of a particular technique, but something you argue with your creations.

And that includes political reality. "Italy, without foreigners, without tourism, would be dead," Abouzeid says. "None of us are here because we want to take something," he continues. "We're here because we feel that Italy has something to give and we have something contribute."

With his photo-paintings, Abouzeid places the foreigner into the Italian narrative. These are the people who make our city, he says. They belong in our country; they belong in our stories about who we are; and they belong in our art.