With vibrant color and refined lines, classical paintings immortalize the fashions, events and people of the past. Memes, in their own way, try and do the same thing. These meme paintings have been twisted and prodded, with people throwing on text that the artists back in the 1700s could never have expected. But it's probable that those artists would actually understand meme culture pretty well. What would be more challenging to them is the concept of a JPEG or PNG file.

Would you be able to explain what a JPEG is to a person born in 1712? Many of the things these memes joke about are much more eternal than technology: love, working hard, making good friends and the everyday stresses and joys of life. Whether it's through pigments mixed out of animal and plant matter foraged from trees and handled by dye-makers, or through digital images slapped together in a frenzied flash of inspiration, the human heart still seeks expression in colors, forms and pictures. It always will.