Dingo the Dissident

THE BLOG OF DISQUIET : Qweir Notions, an uncommonplace-book from the Armpit of Diogenes, binge-thinker jottings since 2008 .

Friday 18 September 2020

Jesus, in paintings,

never looks cheerful, always looks thin,
a bit gaunt, sometimes emaciated, his skin
colour that of the painter's countrymen*.

But his mother is quite a different
kettle of fish - almost always simpering
teenage soft porn.  So I was pleased
that a Valencian furniture-restorer
gave some earthiness to a copy
of a painting by Murillo (a painter of the Sentimental
School of art) which he volunteered to restore
(for a fee).




On the left you can see
the original (copy of the) cute little
porn-Queen of Heaven,
and on the right, the two more-convincing
(if badly-painted) imaginings of the restorer.

Why would Jesus' mother have conformed
to some European male fantasy ?  Why would
she not have been 'ugly', scrawny from hunger,
perhaps even bruised by
her fraught relationship with her husband ?

more here >

*Being bearded and skeletal, though not circumcised,
 I was once proclaimed Saviour
as I gave suck to a sweet and impassioned
(perhaps over-wrought, too-religious)
young man in a corner of Venice at night.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

"In paintings of Jesus he rarely looks like the ." <-- did a word go missing there? Or is this an intentional gap? ... Son of God? ... Messiah? ... Jesus, lamb of God? ... Levantine born out of wedlock instigator? M.

Wofl said...

Yes, something (maybe something very apt or witty) got deleted here...I have no idea what.
So I rewrote the first lines.
Many thanks for pointing it out.

Wofl said...

It's not one of my better blogs...