This past week, during our Spring Break, we received an assignment to collect pictures of religious media that provided communicative messages from the Catholic church. During this time, I discovered two pieces that I believe the Catholic church used as a means to convey the suffering of Jesus and their God’s ultimate sacrifice in a moment from the biblical narrative. For the majority of my break, I vacationed in Spain, specifically Madrid, where I visited the Prado Museum. Among the enormous collection of artworks, I discovered a painting by Antonello da Messina called The Dead Christ supported by an Angel. Additionally, I attended the Correr Museum in Venice, Italy. In the Correr Museum, I also found a painting depicting the same moment in Christ’s life. This comparable piece is titled Dead Christ Supported by Two Angels and was painted by Giovanni Bellini. Both paintings portray the moment after Jesus Christ was brought down from the cross after his crucifixion. In both works, Jesus’s partially naked body reveals his colorless skin thus portraying his lifeless self. Additionally, Jesus’s hands and head loosely fall to represent the weakness of his dead body. Most significantly, both artists painted Jesus’s bloody wounds on his hands, head, and the laceration on his torso. Here it is evident that the Catholic church wants the audience to meditate on the physical suffering that Christ experienced. Among another prominent component of the artworks is the illustration of the angels. Although Antonello da Messina only painted one angel while Bellini included two, both artists attempted to display signs of the angel’s mourning. Each of the angels expressed faces of sorrow and grief as a result of the death of Christ. Moreover, Antonello da Messina even painted tears upon his angel’s face. Additionally, all of the angels are supporting the dead Christ by bearing his arms. This intentional positioning is a means to communicate to the viewers the support that the angels and furthermore the Lord provides. Even further, the Catholic church is attempting to draw attention to their belief in a God that is willing to sacrifice his only son for the forgiveness of all the sins of the earthly world. In conclusion, these two images depicted a scene as described in the Bible and therefore, according to the Goethals category of storytelling, provided a way for the church to spread their message to all levels of education. Through this experience, I have found religious artwork among various forms of media to be quite intriguing. This method allowing the church to encode a variety of messages for the viewer to decipher on their own is fascinating to me.
コメント