Category: Christian art

So… fun times. Religious art again. Because, ya know, Bible Belt and all. I am not a massive fan, but hey, it’s a huge part of our world heritage and so on and so forth. Whatever, it’s a thing. What bothers me about this is the descriptive plaque being completely ignorant about the fact that Mary would likely not have owned a Torah, and likely she would not have been reading even had she been a wealthy Jewish woman of the time, let alone marrying a carpenter – but yeah, let’s creatively fudge the facts to fit the Jesus mythos.

I feel like this is a study of everything I dislike so much in 17th Dutch painting: it’s a monochromatic study in browns of the interior of a church in a hyper-realistic psuedo-photographic style. It’s too much of a muchness. It’s the world duplicated in an exactness that is depressingly real, but in monochrome brown. (And to me, brown is the antithesis of color: it is all colors mixed together, so it isn’t really a color at all, but rather a lack of color.)

So, hey, it was totally a thing with the religious artists to paint prostitutes and adulteresses with their breasts exposed or partially exposed because that’s apparently how you tell someone is a hooker or sleeping with someone not their husband. Don’t get me started on Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery, yo. We’ll be here all night. But yes, it is a theme. Apparently, it’s a theme that extends to reformed prostitutes turned saints, as well, because, oh hai Mary Magdalene’s boobs for no particular reason whilst angels get eyefuls adoringly, also for no particular reason. Classy, y’all. Why exactly the reformed prostitute saint is being carried aloft into the sky by angels as if she’s a Boeing jet is anyone’s guess, but we’ll leave that to your imagination and hope that your guess is better than mine.