Posted on 11/20/2002 9:58:39 PM PST by Coleus
Naked Madonnas outrage Rome
Luke Baker in ROME
APRIL features a bare-breasted Virgin Mary in high heels, with arms outstretched to reveal bleeding palms like the wounds of Christ on the cross.
September’s Virgin Mary is suckling a child, while March depicts a raven-haired nude washing a woman’s toes in a pose evocative of Mary Magdalene, the prostitute who anointed Jesus’s feet.
For the glamour photographer who took them, they are just an innovative new take on Italy’s Christmas obsession for calendars featuring buxom nudes.
But for a vocal minority in the country the 12 scenes inspired by the life of Christ are blasphemous monstrosities.
In a campaign that echoes similar moves against Martin Scorsese’s film The Last temptation of Christ or against a Benetton advert featuring a dying Aids patients in a Christ-like pose, Christians are demanding that the offending calendars are taken off the shelves.
"It’s the height of sacrilege and a disgraceful transformation (of the Madonna)," Gino Concetti, a moral theologian who is close to the Pope, said.
"It’s playing with religion to exalt hedonism and eroticism, and turns women into blatant consumer objects."
The annual £6.25 million nude Christmas calendar business triggers moral debate almost every year in Italy.
But this time customer complaints have been so strong that some newspaper salesmen have been forced to stop selling the calendar, while others are keeping it hidden under the counter.
It’s all something of a shock to Alberto Magliozzi, the glamour photographer who has an international reputation for his "artistic-erotic" images of celebrities, including Sharon Stone and Nicole Kidman.
"I think the calendar has been misinterpreted," the photographer, 52, said from his studio outside Rome.
"The naked body of a woman is not an obscene thing.
"I didn’t want to create anything blasphemous ... these pictures transmit innocence, desperation, pain and suffering.
"I’m a religious man myself, but I’m also passionate about the aesthetic form.
"Being religious doesn’t mean you can’t appreciate beautiful women."
While conceding some of the images might be difficult to take, Mr Magliozzi said the public reaction was positive and sales were strong, although he had no numbers.
Publishers printed 40,000 copies, which retail for about £5 each.
The controversy is the latest in a series of bitter debates between Christians and the media over the use of religious icons and images.
In 1988, Martin Scorsese’s film The Last Temptation of Christ caused moral outrage through a dream sequence where Jesus made love to Mary Magdalene.
Feeling was so strong that British Board of Film Classification director James Ferman received more than 1,850 letters of complaint before the film was even shown in Britain.
Four years later, clothes retailer Benetton produced an advert featuring a dead AIDS victim with a startling likeness to Jesus Christ.
Glossy magazines pulled the advert after complaints by AIDS campaigners and over fears that it would offends Christians.
But despite the Vatican’s outrage over the new calendars, a random selection of people on the streets of Rome did not seem to find them blasphemous.
"It’s revolting," said 26-year-old Alessandra D’Abramo as she cast an eye over a picture of a red-head looking somewhat angelic, naked but for a slip of white gauze at her waist. "Rather than blasphemous, it’s just ugly."
For the men, the Madonnas can’t compete with the host of other temptresses that adorn calendars.
This year’s favourites include Elisabetta Canalis, the long-legged, sultry girlfriend of Inter Milan soccer star Christian Vieri, who had said she’d never pose topless, and Luisa Corna, another soccer-mad Mediterranean beauty.
Alongside that pair, the Madonnas don’t stand a chance.
"It’s not even that erotic," said Lorenzo Taglioferro, 20, as he went through the calendar.
"I wouldn’t buy it. But Canalis - now she’s a winner."
Earlier this year, the Roman Catholic priest Antonio Mazzi publicly urged Canalis to recall her calendar because he liked her better dressed. But she chose to go ahead anyway.
"I continue to ask why women have to be nude, to be thought of as an object of desire?" the priest said.
But in Italy, as elsewhere, nudity sells.
The most famous calendar of them all, the Pirelli, whose limited private distribution - 46,000 a year - has been sent to select clients of the Italian tyre company since 1964.
Last year the company decided to cover up its models, but nudity has returned for 2003.
Although Italy is a mainly Roman Catholic country with strong family values, it also voted a former porn star, Cicciolina, into parliament and regularly casts scantily clad showgirls as backdrops on talk shows and game shows, not to mention on the covers of respected news weeklies.
The sociologist Franco Ferrarotti calls the phenomenon a kind of societal split personality that is rooted in a refusal by Italians to accept dogma of any kind.
"Italians are Catholic, religious and are happy to receive the Pope in parliament.
"But at the same time, they are also happy to receive naked women in their offices and kitchens by hanging their calendars in public places, accessible to all, even children," he said.
But Enrico Pozzi, a professor of social psychology at Rome’s La Sapienza university, has a far more philosophical answer.
He says the Italian fascination with calendar girls is actually a very natural response to the passage of time that a calendar documents.
"The pin-up is the antidote to the decay, the end that’s implicit in the days that pass," he said.
And to bash Catholic, what else?
Breasts??? Huh? I like breasts.
I didn’t want to create anything blasphemous ... these pictures transmit innocence, desperation, pain and suffering.
<> Nothing says "innocence" like a photo of Mary, The Theotokos, The Ever-Virgin, The Seat of Wisdom, in a pair of high heels.
He mentions "pain and suffering." Those adjectives might prove to ne prophetic, for him. I can't imagine I would be wrong to think that Jesus doesn't consider this evil exploitation of His Mother art<>
No kidding. What would YOU do to someone who put out pictures like that of YOUR mother?
Does anyone remember why God allowed Israel's enemies to conquer her? Anyone else see a correlation with the recent rise of militant Mohammedanism?
Hmmm... maybe Paul McCartney will file a lawsuit...
September’s Virgin Mary is suckling a child...
Lady Madonna, baby at your breast
wonders how you manage to feed the rest.
Oh. Never mind...
Haven't seen these pictures, and based on the descriptions, don't want to. Sure sounds to me like the vocal minority is right in this case.
Hmmm . . .well, based on what CHRIST has said, I would imagine He doesn't want us violently protecting the 'religion'.
All religions can get too fanatical about certain verses, however, it is the wisdom of the religious leaders to deemphasize the violence, and stress tolerance.
Really. Why on earth would that be? After Peter lopped off the cheif priest's ear, Jesus chastised him to put his sword away(Mark 14) and healed the priest(John 22:51). Or did you not read all the accounts and in context? Matthew is most revealing of this:
Matthew [26:51] And, behold, one of them which were with Jesus stretched out his hand, and drew his sword, and struck a servant of the high priest's, and smote off his ear.
[52] Then said Jesus unto him, Put up again thy sword into his place: for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword.
[53] Thinkest thou that I cannot now pray to my Father, and he shall presently give me more than twelve legions of angels?
When Jesus Rebukes one for doing something, I think the proper thing to learn is that you SHOULDN'T do what they did and suffer the same rebuke. How is it then that you have decided it means one should go grab a sword when Jesus rebuked for doing just that?
-My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge
The Stigmata does not signify what you mistakenly think it does. St Francis was the first to receive the Stigmata.<>
Mary in the nude, that is distasteful and dishonorable. Mary in heels doesn't rate on the scale unless you're going to tell every woman on the planet that wearing heels is a sin or something.
<> You don't think Rosie o'Donnell in high heels isn't a sin?<>
But alluding to Mary as redeemer - Blasphemy.
<> The stigmata does not signify what you imagine<>
It's good to see people can get outraged by the right things.. (/sarcasm)
<> It is funny to get pinged by one hoping to score some point and to be able to point out to that person that he scored none, at all, zip, nada, nil (no sarcasm)<>
We aren't talking about Stigmata. We're talking about an allusion in art. This allusion would make it seem that Mary is the redeemer.
As far as the stigmata is concerned, demonic attacks are not a sign of blessedness. They're a sign that someone is deeply in need of prayer and or counseling - if not in need of being saved. Jesus didn't bless people by driving nails through their hands, peircing their sides and cutting marks into their scalps. Jesus blessed people through loving acts, not through terror. He healed rather than harming. One wonders by what logic people manage to turn the world upside down in order to blasphemously say God is good cause he terrorizes people. Sounds like radical Muslim speak..
Rosie in High heels doesn't bother me (lol). If it bothers you, you should get right with God or not pay attention to what Rosie is wearing.
Granted, the Koran is loaded with violence, and so is the Old Testament. The good civilized people typically sweep the violence barbaric stuff under the carpet, and emphasize the peaceful stuff.
Jesus honored his earthly Mother as an example to us in how we should treat our own mothers. What Catholicism does with Mary is no less rediculous than what this man has done. Catholicism made an idol of her. Who owns the log and who the splinter?
I can agree with that to some extent. But I'd alter it after a fashion to say that there are evil people in the world who've made other's believe them righteous. And in their evil they are as rabid as the righteous are zealous. But I'll go one step further - peace is a state in which the righteous and the damned can get along as long as the righteous doesn't convict the Damned by word and or action. Evil people tend to want to throw dogooders out of hell. We cramp their style. Peace achieved by not doing God's will is nothing but a momentary quiet in a brooding storm.
My point was that the Lord used Israel's enemies to punish sinful Israel just as the Lord may be using the Mohammedans to punish the sinful Christian West (the new Israel).
Christians won't, but the Muslims might. Mary is an important figure in the Qu'ran.
"BBC: An Islamic group based in the UK has issued a death fatwa against a playwright whose London stage production depicts Jesus Christ as a homosexual.
"Terrence McNally was sentenced to death by the Shari'ah Court of the UK as his play, Corpus Christi, opened in London on Thursday night. "
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