The Feast of the Gods
What I find hard to understand, though, is how anyone would persist in what can be described only as a chosen, willful ignorance now that the facts have come to light.
I am posting a photo of Jan Van Bijlert's painting "The Feast of the Gods."
If at first you thought France was depicting a re-enactment of the Last Supper based on Da Vinci's rendering of it - I get that. At first I thought that is what I was seeing, also. It is a much more referenced work by an iconic artist than the one by the relatively unknown Van Bijlert. Looking at his painting only makes the confusion around this more understandable.
What I find hard to understand, though, is how anyone would persist in what can be described only as a chosen, willful ignorance now that the facts have come to light. It really did have nothing to do with the Last Supper, and if you are insisting it did then you want the fight even though you know you are wrong about it.
But I also don't understand why, given our collective but mistaken first impressions (again, an understandable mistake), one would go right to anger about it.
What could we have seen while watching it that angered rather than uplifted us? Every culture appropriates what we know about Jesus to fit our assumptions and norms. In the US and European context, we do that by portraying Jesus as white. We know that is an historical mistake inconsistent with the facts - but it helps us relate to our sacred in important and understandable ways if we are white. If we are ok with that - why did we so quickly rise to anger when it was assumed the people of France were doing the same thing?
Did it upset us that Jesus, whom we are told ate with tax collectors and prostitutes, might have been on stage during a display of fashion? That really doesn't make sense and seems at best either inconsistent with the stories we tell about Jesus or at worst hypocritical.
So, I think two things: thank the good people of France for putting on an amazing show for the world to see - you really amazed us all; and let any lingering and manufactured outrage over this just die the death that all mistaken assumptions need to die before they infest us any further with a contempt for each other we all really don't need.