The controversy over the Holy Week poster in Seville, another chapter in the irreverent history of representing the nakedness of holiness

Fray Bartolomé de San Marcos was so fed up with being told that he didn't know how to do nudes that he put himself to the test.

The Renaissance painter (Savignano di Prato, 1472–Florence, 1517) devised a Saint Sebastian of such “soft air and corresponding beauty” that his fellow friars had to remove him from the church, after several women confessed that they felt lasciviously attracted to him. by the imitation of the living.”

The anecdote, told by Giorgio Vasari in his biography of the artist, is more than 500 years old, but is not too far from the dust raised these days by the poster painted by Salustiano García to announce Holy Week in Seville in 2024. Only now There are those who criticize it or collect signatures for its withdrawal, also protected by the supposed gay subtext that it evokes.

More information

The beautiful Christ of discord lights up the brothers of Holy Week in Seville

The professor of Art History at the University of Santiago de Compostela, Francisco Prado-Vilar, contemplates what is happening these days with the curiosity to glimpse in the present “the reaction that Renaissance society must have had” to the humanist emergence of naked

Christs

with delicate features, sensual

Sansebastians

with arrows or

virgins

who breastfed with their breasts exposed.

Although the curious thing is that, neither then nor now, the Church showed opposition to the representation of nudity in religious art.

Or at least in theory, as demonstrated by the references to divine sensuality in the Song of Songs of the Bible, the flesh “as an ornament” of the resurrection in the sermons of Saint Augustine or the poems of the

Spiritual Canticle

of Saint John of the Cross. .

The relationship between the representation of nudity and religious art draws directly from classical Greek and Roman art.

This is where the first artists of the Renaissance went to represent “the idealized body” that required a divine representation, as explained by the art historian and preacher of Holy Week in Seville in 2013, Francis Segura.

The resurrection, a dogma of faith of Catholicism, then became a topic as common as it was complex for artists.

“How do you represent God?

How do you represent someone who is resurrected after death?

It is a combination of man and god.

How do you visualize something like that?

Turning to the classic, to the ideas around you, to what you consider divinity,” says Prado-Vilar.

Something that Salustiano himself claims to have done, after resorting to the memory of his deceased brother and the model of his own son.

Salustiano García, on the left, presents his poster for Holy Week in Seville.CRISTINA QUICLER (AFP)

The poster chosen for the next Holy Week in Seville, created by Salustiano García, has aroused criticism from those who do not consider themselves represented in that image.

But throughout the history of art, the figure of Christ has been represented in very different ways.

One of the representations that have been used as an example to defend the Salustiano García vision is this 'Christ blessing' (1505), by Rafael.

'Resurrected Christ' (1490), by the Italian painter and architect Bramantino. Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum

'The Resurrection' (1509-1511), by Albrecht Dürer.

In the chapel of the Brotherhood of Quinta Angustia, in the parish of Magdalena, this Mannerist sculpture of the Risen Christ, by the sculptor Jerónimo Hernández, which was completed in 1583, is venerated. Archdiocese of Seville

A contemporary representation, the 'Christ of the Winds', by Guillermo Pérez Villalta from Cádiz.

From the time of the Madrid Movida is this work from the series 'El Valle de los Caídos', made between 1980 and 1987 by Costus, the pseudonym used by Enrique Naya Igueravide and Juan José Carrero Galofré.

The Melun Diptych, created by the French painter Jean Fouquet in 1450.

'The Last Judgment' from Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel.

Oil painting of the 'Flagellation of Christ', by the Italian Giovanni Antonio Bazzi, nicknamed 'The Sodom' (1477-1549).

'San Sebastian', by the Bolognese Guido Reni (1575-1642). Prado Museum

'The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian', by El Greco, made between 1577 and 1578.

“It is the ideal of beauty to achieve the truth,” explains the Sevillian art historian and curator José de León, famous for his didactic children on the social network , not everyone has achieved it.

“The majority has opted for an essentialist naturalism.

But I would say that 95% of sculptors have failed to represent the resurrection.

There are models to follow from a crucified person, in the 17th century corpses were hanging, but no one has seen a resurrected person.

You have to invent it.

What painters or sculptors have done throughout history is to refine it into beauty,” explains Andrés Luque, professor of Art History at the University of Seville.

It is different how the public perceives these creations.

Vasari tells the anecdote of San Sebastian that raised lascivious glances from the devotees in the Florentine Quattrocento, but there are many more and more famous cases.

Caravaggio's The Death of the Virgin

(Milan, 1571-Porto Ercole, 1610) was censored after a rumor spread that the tormented painter had used a drowned prostitute as a model.

Although perhaps the best-known stir occurred when Pope Pius IV commissioned Danielle di Volterra in 1564 to cover the intimate parts of the Last Judgment painted by Michelangelo Buonarroti (Caprese, 1475-Rome, 1564) in the Sistine Chapel in the Sistine Chapel in 1564. back.

“They are controversies so far away that we don't see them, but they happened.

As they are paintings from the past, they are considered valid, it is as if it were the sensuality of the past,” explains Miguel Ángel Cajigal, art historian and scientific disseminator in X under the pseudonym El Barroquista.

But those past quarrels had much more limited scope than now.

“Art was previously in private collections or in a chapel.

The client could allow himself certain licenses when commissioning a work and with that it evolved, that is where creativity arose.

Holy Week brings that to the streets.

Public art is something very modern.

Before I couldn't see it and now that I see it, I don't understand it,” says Segura.

With the work of Salustiano García all that dust has been magnified and the brother and Sevillian art historian Jesús Romanov wonders why there is so much anger: “We must not underestimate the opinion of the people, who say that they like to see themselves recognized.

They are people accustomed to customs and baroque style.

What I don't think is the harassment and demolition of the poster and poster artist.

I ask why they call him gay and homoerotic and they don't know how to answer me.”

'Resurrected Christ', by Bramantino. Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum

The disseminator , famous for

his

educational threads on the social network

We will never let art serve as an excuse to impose reactionary ideologies.”

León only sees how in the resurrected Salustiano, as contemporary in execution as it is classical in form, the updated Apollonian ideal acts.

Segura believes that the problem may lie right there, after the values ​​have been inverted in the contemplation of a sacred work with respect to the Renaissance: “Before, it responded to canons of classical sculpture.

In today's world, those bodies are vulgar, it is a very present reality and now the vulgar shocks us."

In any case, the six experts consulted agree in pointing out the view of the viewer as the prejudiced one, in the face of a work that has evident artistic quality.

“And here, when that is not even in the artist's intention, they see a gay subtext that does not even exist, and is totally projected,” Prado Villar denounces.

“If we go along that line, we are going to have to return to the Romantic, where the Christs were dressed.

We have entered a rather dangerous line coming from Protestantism and its Puritanism.

That is not typical of the Catholic world,” adds Romanov in an annoyed tone.

And hence León harangues the Sevillians to take a stand.

“Holy Week is tremendously human and connects people of all kinds.

Pride is having created a ritual that, with all the advances and secularization, continues to be inspiring to create new things, to tell old things today with artists of different styles.

That is the greatness of the rite, are we going to cut it without foundation due to unreason?

"It's time to decide," the historian concludes, convinced that the opposing voices are "not at all" the majority.

Salustiano García, on the left, presents his Holy Week poster in Seville together with members of the Council of Brotherhoods and Brotherhoods and the mayor of the town.

Subscribe to continue reading

Read without limits

Keep reading

I am already a subscriber

_