Male Domination Art, Part 3: The Prurient Church

In the 13th Century, the Black Death took the lives of some 30 - 60% of  Europeans.  Germs were unknown and unknowable; who would  be struck down in horrible agony was arbitrary; humans do not like arbitrary control over their lives; fantastic theories were developed to explain the deaths, though not more fantastic than the religions, political, and economic theories used to explain the millions of arbitrary deaths by bombs and bullets that the 20th Century featured.


One saint in particular was though to be able to persuade God to spare you if you were devout enough.  Sebastian was venerated because, though he was shot through with arrows, his faith was so strong that he survived.

Here are paintings of Sebastian, painted by some of the finest painters who ever lived.   The paintings were commissioned by the Church to lure back folks who had fallen away because of the Black Death or because the Evil Reformation was underway in the North of Europe.  See if you might have been lured back, if there were no internet pictures to peer at.

St. Sebastian, Peter Paul Rubens (1614)

Staatliche Museen, Berlin

St. Sebastian, Guido Remi

St. Sebastian, El Greco

Chapel of St. Sebastian 

painting by Domination, 1628-31

mosaic by  , 1730-36

Saint Sebastian,El Greco, 16th Century

Cathedral of San Antolin, Palencia

St. Sebastian, Pierre et Gilles, 1987

St. Sebastien, Agholo Bronzino, 1525 

Saint Sebastian Bound for Martyrdom, Sir Anthony van Dyke,1520

Friday Cottage, Columbia, South Carolina 1840

 (and it had better be of St. Sebastian, though no arrow is visible.)

Did we really pierce Cassius Clay, then the most famous person in the world, wit arrows?

I guess we did.

St. Sebastian,  nude, André Durand 2007 

(violating an old Church belief that the only Penis 

Holy enough to be displayed in a painting

 was the Holy Penis of Jesus, 

pits of which lie in many  a 

Catholic Church, 

so it is devoutly

 believed.  

See my  post,   

The Naked, the Nude, and the Shit-Eating Grin. 

And see An Irreverent Curiosity: In Search of the Church's Strangest Relic in Italy's Oddest Town,

by r David Farley 

Men are cruel, but none so cruel as to lock some away in a little concrete box, indefinitely, sometimes for lie; none so cruel, that is, as Governor Pat Brown of California.

Prisoners in solitary confinement are allowed no human contact, ever.

Home

The Exercise Yard, into which one is allowed one hour out of every 24

The California prison at Pelican Bay disciplines prisoners with "indefinite detention" as a disciplinary measure, so the discipline is not forbidden by the Constitution, though the detention may least a lifetime, and it drives men mad.  Government-enforced solitary confinement that drives men mad is neither cruel nor unusual, so say a majority of our Supreme Court, for which my confidence wains daily. that drives you insane is not


I'd rather be in a prison in El Salvador

. . . . if I can't be right where I am.