Scorpion Dagger: The Renaissance Needs More Pizza and Beer

Haunting, weird, controversial and wickedly funny, these gifs created by James Kerr A.K.A Scorpion Dagger are made from parts of well-known Renaissance paintings along with the flotsam and jetsam of his insane imagination.

Renaissance and Medieval art has been hitherto considered too high brow to be messed with. Although Scorpion Dagger proves that anything is ripe for the picking, when you combine medieval art and digital methods of graphics production. Suddenly there are countless more ways to reinvent art. The gif is an ideal format for grotesque meme combinations. It’s infinitely corruptible, portable and viral: that’s why it’s special.

These paintings all originally had figures painted with expressions of fierce and cold piousness. Now they have the piss taken out of them in an infinite number of ways. No religious iconography is off limits either.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I am trying to create this world where all of these characters exist in art history, but that they can exist outside of the paintings that they are in. – James Kerr

 

 

Kerr begun taking out pieces from his own portfolio, animating them and posting them. After he starting exhausting this, he went to the Library of Congress and sourced copyright free images and begun animating those. There is a transition point where he started looking at medieval manuscripts and renaissance paintings.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You would see a scene in one of these paintings and you’d wonder…what the hell is going on. You wanna have fun with it. Imagine if da Vinci was into Sasquatches? – James Kerr

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Originally he was going to only make 1 gif per day for 1 year as a reason to stay creative and keep working during a quiet period. Now that his gifs are hot property all over the world and he loves the creation process so much, Kerr is finding it harder to find a reason to stop!

 

 

 

 

 

GIFs shared with permission from Scorpion Dagger

James’ Video

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