by admin

Sep 30, 2025

artdeals, swordpress

Does anyone find it disturbing that the main churches in Rome including the sistine chapel have nudity and pagan symbols?

I’ve notice devils and idols on many pictures of Churches in Europe.

I wasn’t aware that this had been going on since the 12th century.

In the 16th century the vatican hired an artist to paint over some of the offensive nudity that were even parts of the Last Judgment.

The sheer quantity of nudity in the Vatican is astonishing to anyone who has not already decided that comments like this are a sign of artistic oafishness.

I come away with the serious question whether all these ubiquitous private parts are a devout message, or a subtle disdain for the church. Is the in-your-face exposure of God’s buttocks really a faithful exposition of Exodus 33:23? Or is the pope being mooned?

My own take is that if this is an attempt at exposition, it does not succeed.

Michaelangelo’s stuff in the Sistine Chapel represent his own homo-erotic fantasies; that stuff should be sandblasted off the walls. not just covered up by “Il Vestitore”. Interestingly I heard on EWTN Radio today someone praising St. John Paul II the Great for having had the genitalia re-exposed. Many of those Renaissance Popes were thoroughly corrupt, naturalist, and hedonist (as evidenced by their own lifestyles). Bishop Williamson clearly traces the beginnings of the modern decline to the Renaissance. Should someone really offer Mass while surrounded by exposed private parts? Art is supposed to elevate the soul above nature (as in the idea of the Icons) and not draw the mind to the sensual.

I also agree that the gargoyle-type things on the Medieval cathedrals were uncalled for.

You needn’t accuse the OP of Protestantism. This junk is distasteful at best and doesn’t belong in a church.

I guess if you’re not into JP2-like theology of the body then you’re Protestant now? That’s not to say that there’s anything sinful or inherently wrong about the body, but the quasi-grotesque bare behinds and privates hanging over the Blessed Sacrament are borderline sacrilegious.

I don’t like nudity in Churches. If we allow nudity in the art, then why not allow nude people into the Churches as well?

I would also destroy all the pagan garbage in the Vatican museum. Many Christians gave their lives in martyrdom because they would not participate in pagan religion and these idolatrous pagan statues are honored in a Catholic museum? If someone were to convince me that these need to be kept for historical purposes, then I would sell them to secular museums (they would fetch untold millions) and use the proceeds to build up the Church or else just give to the poor.

At Vatican, Nude Art Is Too Much to Bare : Sistine Chapel: Some private parts will stay private after restoration.

WILLIAM D. MONTALBANOTIMES STAFF WRITER

Here is the final word on “The Last Judgment”: Art and history demand a partial cover-up.

So said experts this week, announcing the final phase of the restoration of Michelangelo’s Renaissance masterpiece painting behind the altar in the Sistine Chapel.

It has taken four years to restore the 60-foot-tall fresco of a righteous God rewarding the faithful and hurling sinners to the fires of hell. When “The Last Judgment” returns to public view around Easter, it will mark the first time in 14 years that the chapel where Popes are elected can be seen in its restored entirety.

Before that happens, though, there are some hard decisions to make regarding 38 “modesty breeches” added over the centuries at the instruction of Popes who believed that Michelangelo had painted altogether too much of some of his saints and sinners.

Some of the breeches, pronounced “britches,” were ordered by the Council of Trent in the Counter-Reformation in the 16th Century.

Others were added in the 17th and 18th centuries at the whim of later pontiffs, said chief restorer Gianluigi Colalucci. “They are all in tempera, with the original underneath, and we are in the process of deciding which ones to keep,” Colalucci said.

“We will leave the ones done by Daniele da Volterra in the 16th Century and take away the later additions.”

A tour of the scaffolding with Vatican Museum officials one cold morning this week offered a firsthand view of the censor’s art.

Michelangelo himself dressed Christ and his mother, her eyes averted from the anguish and exaltation of the moment of judgment. He also draped strategic bits of cloth here and there and coiled a cobra around the private parts of a hell-bound fat man with donkey’s ears.

Two saints–one he, one she–whom Michelangelo painted in the altogether, were dressed by his successors, who also resorted to artifices ranging from fig leaves to girdles to something like jock straps to what look like belly bags gone south.

As in the decade-long restoration that brought bright color back to the world’s most famous ceiling, work on Judgment Wall has removed four centuries of grime and soot, most of it from the smoke of candles and oil lamps.

As restored, “The Last Judgment” is more dramatic and warmer than the ceiling.

Painted by an aging Michelangelo from 1536 to 1541, it now bursts with color, dominated by a rich blue made conspicuous by its scarcity on the ceiling begun three decades before.

“The blue comes from lapis lazuli, a ground stone that had to be imported and was terribly expensive. For the ceiling, Michelangelo was paid a flat fee, including materials and paint. For ‘The Last Judgment,’ though, he had a handsome salary, and the Pope paid separately for the paint–so he used the best,” said Fabrizio Mancinelli, a Vatican Museum director.

Comparing the two restorations, Mancinelli said, it is clear that as painting, “The Last Judgment” is superior. In it, Michelangelo demonstrates some influence of Venetian painting and shows that he has traveled far from his Florentine roots that dominate on the ceiling, he said.

Mancinelli says that art, history and common sense all will be weighed in coming months in determining which of the cover-up breeches to remove.

“We could not easily conserve the later ones. They were painted dark to match the color of the painting as it aged. To save them, they would have to be retouched,” Mancinelli said.

Mancinelli, though, has affection for the early breeches. He believes that Da Volterra, in painting over parts of the masterpiece, may have saved “The Last Judgment” even as he defiled it. The Council of Trent ordered paintings destroyed elsewhere in Rome but made an exception with Michelangelo.

“They put up the scaffold in January, 1564, and left it there for two years to accomplish a very little work. Daniele didn’t paint until ’65, and when he died in ’66 it was still there.”

Mancinelli suspects that the scaffold was used to screen the painting from mind and eye until impulses that might have destroyed it had dispelled.

“We must be respectful of these breeches,” he said.

Nudes in sacred art convey 4 different types of symbolism

Michelangelo | PD

Philip Kosloski | Jul 17, 2017

A doorway to a greater appreciation of the “personal mystery” of humanity.

The Sistine Chapel enthralls thousands of tourists a year with its amazing beauty. What many are surprised to find, though, is the number of naked bodies on its walls.In fact, a large number of the persons depicted in the Sistine Chapel were painted in their birthday suits, without even a leaf to cover the intimate parts.

The Sistine Chapel is of course not alone in its presentation of nudity. Countless artists over the centuries have used nude men and women to populate their artwork, and these pieces of art are featured in Catholic churches around the world.

Why did so many artists use nudes in Christian artwork?

Naked bodies have a long history in sacred art; by the Renaissance artists used four different types of nudity to symbolize four states of humanity.

First there is nuditas naturalis, representing the natural state of humanity before the Fall, often depicted in scenes connected to Eden or Paradise.

Then there is nuditas temporalis, depicting poverty, sometimes voluntary in nature, and the reliance of humanity on God for all that we receive.

Third there is nuditas virtualis, symbolizing purity and innocence. Depictions of “the penitent Magdalene,” for example, often show her naked, clothed only in her hair, as a symbol of the soul’s return to innocence after repentance.

Last of all there is nuditas criminalis, representing the horror of lustful passions and vanity.

St. John Paul II explained in his Theology of the Body how “in the great period of Greek classical art—there are works of art whose subject is the human body in its nakedness … This leads the viewer, through the body, to the whole personal mystery of man. In contact with these works … we do not [naturally] feel drawn by their content to ‘looking lustfully.’”

Depiction of nudity in this way is clearly completely different than the use of nudity in pornography.

John Paul II points out how pornographic productions have the explicit intention of arousing lust; they present the human body as an object to be used. Porn does not respect the dignity of the human person and the sexual act is exploited for personal satisfaction at the expense of another.

In contrast, nudity in Christian art is meant to reveal the beauty of humanity and the marvelous work of the creator. It has deep symbolism and is not meant to be a stumbling block, but a doorway to a greater appreciation of the “personal mystery” of humanity.