Was Matisse A Mormon?

[poliphilo]

Interesting TV documentary last night in which Waldemar Januszczak got to demonstrate that Julius II, the warrior Pope who commissioned Michelangelo to paint the Sistine chapel ceiling, was a loonie who thought he was the Messiah.
Mchelangelo was his propagandist. Decode The Sistine Chapel and it's telling us a story about how Julius is really Jesus.

Waldemar didn't push the contemporary parallels, but in some ways it's reassuring to be reminded that George Bush isn't the first world leader to base his foreign policy on a skewed interpretation of the Bible.

And Michelangelo? Did he know what he was doing? Probably. Did he believe in what he was doing? Probably not. But what the hell- it was an excuse to paint lots of fit young men in the raw. Even so, it's a bit like discovering that Picasso did his best work while in receipt of generously filled brown envelopes from the Jehovah's Witnesses.

Comments

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

"Pass the Parcel" is where you sit in a circle and pass round a prize that's been wrapped in lots and lots of layers of paper. Every time the music stops the person who's holding the parcel gets to take off a layer. The person who removes the final layer keeps the prize.

Over here "Whisper" is known as "Chinese Whispers". Heaven knows why.

I remember being told the (almost certainly apochryphal) story of how the front-line General despatched a runner with the message, "Send reinforcements; were going to advance." The first runner passed it to second runner and so on down the line until by the time the message reached headquarters it had turned into "Send three and fourpence; we're going to a dance."

I rather like the story of Jesus sprinkling water by the lake. It has a Franciscan quality.

At the end of the day I suppose it's up to each one of us to decide for ourselves which part of the Gospel message we're going to accept as "genuine". For every believer, a different Jesus- and why not?