There is movement on the networks with the Seville Holy Week poster, inscribed in that place of controversy that is obvious to the eye but at the same time incomprehensible to the science of radars: the taboo. A controversy that resides in the eye of the beholder and therefore would burn the chips of any artificial intelligence that wanted to understand it. The anathema, the obvious and unpronounceable, is something so controversial in sacred art that to pronounce it aloud can turn us into statues of salt.
be it We assume the statutory sentence. In the Seville Holy Week poster, in this Christ who has mounted a Christ, there is no heretical element that contradicts orthodoxy, no artistic license that does not abound in a centuries-old tradition of westernizing and beautifying the carpentry of Nazareth for the enjoyment and evangelization of white Caucasians. If perhaps, the sin of the artist is to make it beautiful, beautiful without stink, to the point of turning it into an uncomfortable eros. “Young as a metaphor for purity and attractiveness because beauty and goodness are the same thing”, explains Salustiano García, the renowned artist who authored the piece.
The problem is that his Christ, for which he took his son as a model, is so beautiful that admiration becomes desire. Without there being anything that deviates from the canon (the beard, the hair, the cape… everything conforms to the archetype represented a thousand and one times in marble, wood and oil), the sexuality of the icon is patent But it resides in the eye that looks, as desire always does.
Human beauty has the disadvantage of summoning us when it overflows, something that the Christian iconographic tradition has never avoided. In fact, he has worked tenaciously on the sensuality of the messiah, which is why the crucified Christ, languid, has always had his cloak pulled from the waist to the hip, leaving the lower belly visible, it doesn’t matter who the artist is, the material or the ‘age. And that sinuous image only needed arrows and tied hands for San Sebastián to become the great icon of gay culture.
Byzantine Muslims and Christians foresaw these sinful evocations and aligned themselves with iconoclastic theses, which forbid images of the divine, necessarily amphibological, because they disturb the parishioner and poison the sense of virtue and sin. The opposites, the Catholic iconoclasts, found a sophistry to defend their Captives and Dolorosas: the images of the divinity are not worshiped (which would violate the dogma) but are simply “mirror” of the divine, not divine in themselves . The finger, a sophistry, a fraud like a piano.
But the truth is that in the history of art, the sexuality of the author ends up imprinted on the piece. Every saint or god has been the vessel of the artist’s lubricity. For this reason, the most beautiful thing about the Salustiano poster is that it reminds us that the saints speak loudly to us about the sexuality of Michelangelo and Caravaggio. And they shout to us what they had to keep quiet: “The body of Christ, amen”.
