Spain: Is this Jesus way too hot?
Is nothing sacred anymore—not even Christ? asked Jaume Vives in La Gaceta de la Iberosfera. Like many Spaniards, I’m appalled at the blasphemous portrayal of Jesus in the official Holy Week poster for the city of Seville. The poster shows the Son of God fresh-faced and nearly naked, striking a pose so “effeminate” that he’s surely meant to look gay. “Objectively, the artwork is horseshit,” a trashy mix of “kitsch and profanity.” Worse, it is inaccurate. The Bible tells us that Jesus “was a very manly man.” He was a revolutionary who “chased the merchants from the temple with whips,” yet here it looks as if he frightened them off “with his purse.” Holy Week isn’t Pride Week—it’s supposed to be a solemn commemoration of the passion and resurrection of Christ.
Spain can talk of little else, said Nuria Labari in
El País. In just the first few days after it was unveiled, a Change.org petition calling for its “immediate removal” from the streets of Seville garnered thousands of signatures, and an association of Christian lawyers said it would consider legal action. Yet not every Spaniard is upset: When the satirical magazine Mongolia posted the image on its Instagram, the comments were immediately approving, if a bit thirsty. “I was an atheist but now I believe,” reads one. “The body of Christ, amen,” reads another. Several referred to Our Lord as a JILF. The result is that “Gay Christ” is now a meme all over the internet.
The artist, Salustiano García, professes to see nothing homoerotic or indecent about his Jesus, said Ana Diéguez-Rodríguez in El Correo de Andalucía. He says he modeled the figure using the face of his son and the physique of his late brother. But maybe that’s the problem: People expect Christ to look divine, not like someone you’d “recognize on the street or in a TikTok.” This Christ doesn’t look like he’s about to die on the cross, but rather about to ask if he can borrow your cellphone. The painting is definitely corny, said Javier González-Cotta in Diario de Sevilla. At first glance, all I saw were the “shiny, lacquered locks” of flowing hair, making me assume this was an ad “for the range of conditioners from Garnier Fructis.” Do I love it? No. But “the controversy is already tiring.” At least the poster has done what it was intended to and publicized Seville’s Holy Week events across Europe and beyond.
There should be nothing controversial about a sexy Christ, said Ben Lawrence in The Telegraph (U.K.). Artistic renditions of Jesus have “erred towards the risqué” since the Renaissance, when Michelangelo showed a “hunky Jesus holding the cross like a modern-day gladiator with a pugil stick”— someone to adore, yes, but also “someone to objectify.” Caravaggio, “one of the most famously gay artists in history,” often painted Jesus looking ripped. And things have only gotten wilder since then. In modern times, we’ve had “BDSM Jesus, cross-dressing Jesus, and gay-biker Jesus,” while Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ has been infuriating Catholics since 1987. I find García’s “Calvin Klein model of a Messiah” to be “fairly horrid” as art. But as scandals go, this outcry “would have felt anachronistic in 1450.”