Narcissus emerged from his watery grave this weekend to atone for his sins and, with the help of technology, that mythological arranged the marriage between modern vanity and fine art. The new Google Arts app matches users with their museum doppelganger, and it will save some culture.

This Renaissance will start with a selfie. Download the app. Flash your face. And within half a second, a side-by-side of you and the persons you most represent in historical paintings will appear. It’s like Snapchat with the added benefit of preserving civilization, and it really is quite excellent. As a result, it quickly went viral.

Kumail Nanjiani of HBO’s Silicon Valley looked like the self-portrait "Mohammed Al Mazrouie" from the Barjeel Art Foundation.

Jake Tapper of CNN looked like Henry C. Casselli’s "Ronald Reagan" from the Smithsonian Portrait Gallery

Kate Hudson looked like Pierpont Limner looked like "Portrait of a Boy" in Houston's Museum of Fine Arts.

Your author looks like that 12-year-old Dutch kid in Diego Velázquez’s "Old Woman Frying Eggs" from the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh.

And chances are good that if you checked Instagram this weekend, you saw at least someone share their Classical selfie. Suddenly Tintoretto was appearing on Twitter. Piero della Francesca debuted on Facebook. Francisco Goya made it onto Instagram. Somewhere some millennial had to begin wondering about the difference between Edouard Manet and Claude Monet.

This is nothing short of miraculous, and this moment should not go uncelebrated. There was a photo of a dozen or so high school students at a museum absorbed in their phones and ignoring Rembrandt's "Night Watch" a couple of years ago. The image went viral, and it still makes the rounds of the Internet today. But it lasted just long enough to generate enough outrage among art patrons to ask what could be done to recruit the next generation.

This app seems to have the answer. More than a gimmick, it introduces young adults to art by tossing them onto the canvas. The user cannot help but identify with the subject pictured. And isn’t that the goal of good art? To move the audience to better understand the beauty of nature and the complexity of human nature? In a day when there are more duck faces in the cloud than portraits in museums, Google has helped to achieve that. Now Narcissus can rest easy.