García himself also told the Atlas News Agency: “There is nothing innovative in this painting. There is contemporaneity, but all the elements I used have been used in the last seven centuries in sacred art.” It’s an element.” Art historian Morgan Hay agrees that what is happening here is not shocking, saying that the controversy “seems to me… like a huge overreaction to a statue of Christ. “Although it is rare in modern times, it is not particularly noticeable,” he added. Biblical figures and saints have often been portrayed as attractive or “sexy” in art history, such as a scantily clad young St. Sebastian with an arrow stuck in them, or the naked body of Mary Magdalene covered only by her hair. I often got caught. , or the muscular torso of Christ in works such as Michelangelo. Haig says Garcia’s paintings are as close to the real Christ as paintings by Raphael, Leonardo or Titian.
And in the grand scheme of church art, this is not the first representation of Christ to receive negative attention. Compared, for example, to Andres Serrano’s deliberately vulgar 1989 Piss Christ, Garcia’s image seems quite tame.
The debate over what Christ looked like has been going on for years in both religious and artistic circles. Alicia Batten, professor of religious studies and theology at the University of Waterloo in Canada, told BBC Culture that images of Christ in the Christian tradition are constantly changing, usually influenced by the values of the artists and societies that create them. He said it reflects that. “Given the predominance of certain notions of masculinity in many ‘Western’ cultures, it is no wonder that some people are offended by this image of Spain. seems to challenge some people’s ideals of what it should be like to be a man, and indeed their concept of what it means to be a man. ”
It is important to remember why Garcia’s painting was painted in the first place: to attract people to church for Easter. Haig imagines that the Baroque popes would be overjoyed if paintings made people interested in what Jesus looked like, or what he didn’t look like. Says. Garcia’s latest work actually accomplished its goal of getting more people to attend Easter Mass.
“What is clear,” Alarcón added, is that the potentially controversial “is not the issue of nudity, on the contrary; it is precisely the purity that the artist literally took from the procession of Christ in Seville. “This Christ is naked, just like the other Christs who go out during Holy Week.”
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