A bold, visionary artist in Italy has apparently pushed preconceived notions of a "mermaid" to the side and has proudly plopped a new mermaid statue with a giant nude butt in the middle of Puglia, a fishing village in southern Italy.

While most artists traditionally depict mermaids with a female top half and a scaly, fish-like bottom half (meaning there is usually no need to render a human posterior in their work), a brave Italian artist from the Luigi Rosso art school in Monopoli shoved that convention aside, baffling locals and going viral thanks to coverage from The Guardian and other media outlets around the world.

The mermaid, which also has a voluptuous top half, is intended to be a "tribute to the great majority of women who are curvy," according to Adolfo Marciano, the headteacher of the Luigi Rosso art school. He said that if his students made a skinny mermaid statue, it would be "very bad," especially as women of "our country" [Italy] are curvy.

It's unclear if locals are offended by the curvacious siren. According to The Guardian, actor Tiziana Schiavarelli posted that he had heard from friends who were "perplexed" by the monument, but added that she herself found it "amusing" and a potential tourist attraction.

Users on the Facebook page for The Monopoli Times, the publication that first snapped photos of the mermaid, seem more liable to crack jokes about the statue than voice offense.

Meanwhile, many on English-speaking social media are saluting the unnamed artists behind the "nice-dumpered" mermaid for executing a bold vision outside of social norms.

At any rate, the statue seems better received than another recent attempt at sculpted nudity, Greg Lansky's Algorithmic Beauty, which similarly reimagined a classic figure (in this case the Venus de Milo) and "updated" it with large breasts and a giant backside.