The Prado Museum Digitally Alters Four Masterpieces to Strikingly Illustrate the Impact of Climate Change

Accord­ing to the Unit­ed Nations’ Inter­gov­ern­men­tal Pan­el on Cli­mate Change, glob­al warm­ing is like­ly to reach 1.5°C above pre-indus­tri­al lev­els between 2030 and 2052 should it con­tin­ue to increase at its cur­rent rate.

What does this mean, exact­ly?

A cat­a­stroph­ic series of chain reac­tions, includ­ing but not lim­it­ed to:

–Sea lev­el rise
–Change in land and ocean ecosys­tems
–Increased inten­si­ty and fre­quen­cy of weath­er extremes
–Tem­per­a­ture extremes on land
–Drought due to pre­cip­i­ta­tion deficits
–Species loss and extinc­tion

Look to the IPCC’s 2018 Spe­cial Report: Glob­al Warm­ing of 1.5°C for more specifics, or have a gan­der at these dig­i­tal updates of mas­ter­pieces in Madrid’s Museo del Pra­do’s col­lec­tions.

The muse­um col­lab­o­rat­ed with the World Wildlife Fund, choos­ing four paint­ings to be altered in time for the recent­ly wrapped Madrid Cli­mate Change Con­fer­ence.

Artist Julio Fala­gan brings extreme drought to bear on El Paso de la Lagu­na Esti­gia (Charon Cross­ing the Styx) by Joachim Patinir, 1520 — 1524

Mar­ta Zafra rais­es the sea lev­el on Felipe IV a Cabal­lo (Philip the IV on Horse­back) by Velázquez, cir­ca 1635.

The Para­sol that sup­plies the title for Fran­cis­co de Goya’s El Quitasol of 1777 becomes a tat­tered umbrel­la bare­ly shel­ter­ing mis­er­able, crowd­ed refugees in the sod­den, makeshift camp of Pedro Veloso’s reimag­in­ing.

And the Niños en la Playa cap­tured relax­ing on the beach in 1909 by Joaquín Sorol­la now com­pete for space with dead fish, as observed by artist Con­spir­a­cy 110 years fur­ther along.

None of the orig­i­nal works are cur­rent­ly on dis­play.

It would be a pub­lic ser­vice if they were, along­side their dras­ti­cal­ly retouched twins and per­haps Hierony­mus Bosch’s The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights, to fur­ther unnerve view­ers about the sort of hell we’ll soon be fac­ing if we, too, don’t make some major alter­ations.

For now the works in the +1.5ºC Lo Cam­bia Todo (+1.5ºC Changes Every­thing) project are mak­ing an impact on giant bill­boards in Madrid, as well as online.

#LoCam­bi­aTo­do

via Colos­sal

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Glob­al Warm­ing: A Free Course from UChica­go Explains Cli­mate Change

Cli­mate Change Gets Strik­ing­ly Visu­al­ized by a Scot­tish Art Instal­la­tion

A Cen­tu­ry of Glob­al Warm­ing Visu­al­ized in a 35 Sec­ond Video

Per­pet­u­al Ocean: A Van Gogh-Like Visu­al­iza­tion of our Ocean Cur­rents

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in NYC on Mon­day, Jan­u­ary 6 when her month­ly book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domaincel­e­brates Cape-Cod­di­ties by Roger Liv­ingston Scaife (1920). Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.