Zarathustra

Zarathustra was a very large ginger cat who lived in St Petersburg and became, improbably, one of the most widely reproduced cats in the history of fine art. He was inherited by the artist Svetlana Petrova in 2008 after her mother died, and by her own account she was in a deep and immobilising grief when a friend suggested, half in jest, that she should do something creative with the cat.

What she did was insert him into paintings. Using digital collage, Petrova began compositing photographs of Zarathustra into canonical works of Western art — reclining alongside Botticelli's Venus, occupying the arms of the Mona Lisa, lounging across Manet's Olympia, gazing out of a Vermeer. The project, which she called Fat Cat Art, treated the masterpieces with genuine technical respect: the lighting, brushwork texture and colour grading were matched painstakingly, so that the cat appeared to have been painted in by the original artist and simply overlooked by four centuries of scholarship.

The results went viral in 2011 and never really stopped. Fat Cat Art drew millions of visitors, spawned a book, exhibitions in Russia and abroad, and a running conversation among art historians about parody, reproduction and the internet's relationship with the canon. Petrova was clear that the work had a serious dimension underneath the joke — it began as therapy, and it functioned as a way of making the intimidating world of high art approachable to people who would never willingly walk into a gallery.

Zarathustra himself was reportedly an extremely placid animal, entirely unbothered by the photography sessions, and he was widely described in the press as "the world's most famous fat cat". He died in 2018, but the project continued in his memory and the images remain among the most-shared cat pictures ever made — a grief project that turned into an accidental global art phenomenon.