The Nativity, or how Jesus got molested*

*Or how Jesus was a motherfucker**
There's an interesting article in The Stranger, A Lay in a Manger, about the eroticism in religious classical paintings of the Nativity.

I've heard the arguement of religion's utility in society in relation to the Catholic church's sponsorship of arts & science in the Middle-Ages and Renaissance. This ignores the facts that there existed no other institutions. It's also ironic that the sponsorship of science by the church would only serve to diminish the same church's power. And as far as the arts go, it seems if you wanted to draw smut, you had to paint religious smut. (and not the kind that's in the Bible)

Money Quote:

"In many hundreds of pious, religious works, from before 1400 to past the mid-16th century, the ostensive unveiling of the Child's sex, or the touching, protecting, or presentation of it, is the main action," Steinberg writes. The sex of Christ in art history is a "long-suppressed matter of fact."

Steinberg has some disturbing news about that sweet little affectionate chin chuck the baby gives his mother in paintings such as Jan van Hemessen's Madonna and Child from 1543: It's an old erotic gesture dating back to early Egyptian and Greek art. "The chin-chuck, then, betokens the Infant Spouse," Steinberg writes.

To Steinberg, this all is evidence of the divinity of Christ through His humanity. Christ isn't like other babies. He doesn't crawl. He gets fondled by family members.

Thankfully the church has cleaned its act since then... </sarcasm>

**Of course Jesus is a motherfucker. Not only because of all the molestation going on in those classical pictures. But he also impregnated his mom as the Holy Ghost. HOLY INCESTUOUS TRINITY, BATMAN!