Softer, stronger, longer: World Leaders Pictured On The Loo

Startling images of the Queen, American President Barack Obama and Pope Francis performing their daily functions have been doctored by Italian artist Cristina Guggeri.

The 41 year-old imagines world leaders and spiritual figureheads with their underwear around their ankles.

The Queen is pictured on her regal white throne with a chandelier above her head and her hands folded properly in her lap.

President Obama sits between two columns and is wearing striped boxers; while Russian President Vladimir Putin is boxed inside a brick bathroom wearing checked underwear.

Each leader is imagined in a setting that matches their reputation.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who was a member of the socialist movement Free German Youth as a child, appropriately wears a red suit in a red-coloured bathroom.

Luckily Cristina did not break into the Vatican and catch the Pontiff in the privy to capture these images. 

Instead she used a computer program to render their faces using a number of photographs as reference.

Cristina said: “I wanted to imagine the leaders in an intimate moment in their day.

Ordinary people who view my work can liken their daily moment to that of the world leaders, removing them from their ‘thrones’ of power’.”

The unusual pictures are sure to cause a reaction, but Cristina defends her work against critics on the basis of freedom of expression, a debate that has ignited the world after a terrorist attack on the magazine Charlie Hebdo’s Paris office earlier this year.

She said: “I can only remind critics of my work that if there was a prohibition to speak, write or draw on the work of leaders or celebrities in a satirical manner it would lead towards a dictatorship.

“The Pope, the Dalai Lama, as all other human beings of the earth, sit on the toilet. Its natural.”