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A new and unflattering bust of international soccer superstar Cristiano Ronaldo was unveiled at a Portuguese airport on Wednesday, sending the internet and world at large into an immediate tizzy.
On Thursday, the artist behind the goofy Ronaldo statue spoke out and cited Jesus to defend himself.
"It is impossible to please the Greeks and Trojans. Neither did Jesus please everyone," Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa told The Guardian. "This is a matter of taste, so it is not as simple as it seems."
He continued: "What matters is the impact that this work generated. There is always the possibility of making a difference, I was prepared for all this. I used as a base some photos of Cristiano Ronaldo that I found on the internet, nothing specific. I put the photos next to me and started working on the bust."
Most importantly, de Sousa said that Ronaldo himself signed off on the statue. That is, after some minor adjustments.
"Cristiano saw the photos that his brother sent him. I was with the brother at Cristiano's museum in Madeira and from the messages he sent, I could tell that he liked what he saw," he said. "He only asked for some wrinkles that give him a certain expression in his face when he's about to laugh to be changed. He said it made him look older and asked for it to be thinned out a bit to make it smoother and more jovial. But they gave it the go-ahead; they liked what they saw."
Considering that Ronaldo makes a hair stylist regularly touch up the hair on the wax museum statue of himself in order to keep it up to date, that Ronaldo would also have asked this sculptor to touch up some wrinkles seems completely believable.