{"id":6157,"date":"2006-09-01T09:10:34","date_gmt":"2006-09-01T09:10:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/09\/picasso-in-the-vatican.html"},"modified":"2006-09-01T09:10:34","modified_gmt":"2006-09-01T09:10:34","slug":"picasso-in-the-vatican","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/09\/picasso-in-the-vatican.html","title":{"rendered":"Picasso in the Vatican?"},"content":{"rendered":"

In her latest ZENIT column, art historian Elizabeth Lev takes on the director of the Vatican Museum’s statement that he’d like to include a Picasso in the collection.<\/a><\/p>\n

\"62behead\"<\/a> She wonders why, suggests some possibilities, and then, inspired by the Feast of the Beheading of John the Baptist (earlier this week), she considers Caravaggio’s treatment of the subject, and then moves into a reflection on her two artists of the day:<\/p>\n

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Caravaggio’s painting is particularly striking when considered in light of the Picasso painting above. Known as the "bad boy" of art, Caravaggio certainly had a more problematic personal life than Picasso. After twenty years of general troublemaking in Rome, Caravaggio had to flee to Malta as a refugee from justice after having murdered a man over a tennis bet. <\/p>\n

Caravaggio did not live an exemplary Christian life, yet in his art, he succeeded in spurring others to do so. He did not reject the Church and her teachings because he failed to live up to them; instead he showed the way, the pitfalls and the difficulties of accepting the Christian challenge. <\/p>\n

The suffering body of John lying in his own blood and about to be decapitated is not your typical heroic portrayal, yet Caravaggio’s use of light shows how the saint has transcended earthly suffering, through<\/em> his acceptance of this humiliating death at the hands of a capricious girl. <\/p>\n

Great Christian artists don’t use art to justify their personal shortcomings or celebrate their self-indulgent lifestyles. They express the beauty of the human struggle to achieve holiness.<\/em> <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In her latest ZENIT column, art historian Elizabeth Lev takes on the director of the Vatican Museum’s statement that he’d like to include a Picasso in the collection. She wonders why, suggests some possibilities, and then, inspired by the Feast of the Beheading of John the Baptist (earlier this week), she considers Caravaggio’s treatment of…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6157","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nPicasso in the Vatican? - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/09\/picasso-in-the-vatican.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Picasso in the Vatican? - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"In her latest ZENIT column, art historian Elizabeth Lev takes on the director of the Vatican Museum’s statement that he’d like to include a Picasso in the collection. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6157","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6157"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6157\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6157"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6157"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6157"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}