Tani Newton
OPINION
The Olympic Games opening ceremony is the talk of the town, especially the performance that featured a Bacchanalian feast attended by drag queens and their ilk. Some viewers have seen in it a parody of Leonardo’s Last Supper, and this has sparked outrage from Christians, moral conservatives and even Muslims around the world. Any disrespect shown to Leonardo’s art, apparently, can be assumed to be universally “offensive” to Christians.
I would suggest that it is more complicated.
Presumably, if there are still any devotees of the ancient Greek gods alive today, they should be the ones being apologised to. Or maybe they would like it. Or maybe everyone should be apologised to, since the act arguably mocked religion in general and transgressed more or less universal standards of decency and decorum. Or maybe it’s just art and we should all forbear being offended. But why are Christians up in arms?
In the ancient world, where Bacchanalian feasts and the Olympic Games originated, the Jews were distinguished as the people whose God could not be seen and was not to be depicted by images or idols. The Second Commandment categorically forbade religious imagery. This principle was retained in the early church, and Christian art of the first few centuries was conspicuously devoid of any representation of divine beings, including Christ, the God-man. Icons crept into Christianity in the Middle Ages but occasioned fierce controversy, becoming officially tolerated by the Church only around the eighth century.
The rediscovery of ancient literature by Europeans led to the Renaissance of the 15th century and a great flowering of the arts. The Roman Catholic Church, by this time thoroughly decadent, patronised the arts and commissioned many great works. Often, though, the inspiration behind them was largely pagan or humanistic, with little more than a veneer of Christianity. Consider Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam, with life being infused into the first man via some kind of mysterious current from the finger of God, rather than the breath of life; or his naked, uncircumcised, Roman-nosed David, who would be less out of place on the battlefield of Troy than in the Valley of Elah. Leonardo’s Last Supper fits squarely into this paradigm, basically depicting Italian Renaissance men having a meal, with the figure of Christ in the middle one of three windows perhaps hinting at his veiled glory as the Second Person of the Trinity.
Eventually, the Renaissance gave birth to the Protestant Reformation, which set out to correct abuses and restore Christianity to its primitive simplicity. Among many other things, this involved eliminating icons and religious images, many of which were physically smashed and burned. Art historians to this day lament these actions as the senseless destruction of priceless artworks, and indeed, some of those in the destroying mobs may have been motivated less by piety than by anger over the abuse and oppression they had suffered under the Popes. Nevertheless, the ultimate motivation was the principle that God is not to be worshipped or honoured by images. Had the Reformation taken root in Italy, it is quite likely that the Last Supper would have been whitewashed over.
Like so many other things in the modern world, that principle – once so widely held and thoroughly understood – seems to have been largely forgotten. Whether stern or sentimental, Europeanised or historically accurate, images of Christ abound in today’s Christian popular culture. And the desecration of icons is supposed to be offensive to all Christians. But, historically, most churches would have considered Leonardo’s art to be offensive to Christ.
