Martial Law74 X 107 cm mmp
Chen turns to another Piero della Francesca masterpiece to find an element for this painting. There are five important figures in The Baptism of Christ: Christ, John the Baptist, and a group of three angels. These do not serve Chen’s purposes, and he takes the sixth figure, an unimportant man in the background who is removing his shirt before his own baptism.This man is important because he is unimportant. He can represent the anonymous followers of Christ – and, secularly, pious, law-abiding citizenry.In AD 384 Pope Damasus instructed his secretary, Jerome, the da Vinci icon, to revise the Latin New Testament. Jerome learned Hebrew and spent many years in Jerusalem. He was also a Greek scholar. His Latin translation of the scriptures, the Vulgate Bible, became the standard for the Roman Catholic Church and influenced many later translators. Although the da Vinci interpretation makes Jerome look like a mendicant monk, the figure can stand for the enlightened intellectual world of our day.The martial-law figure looks more like a legalized terrorist, a soldier supporting an illegitimate or repressive state, cutting down leaders and common citizens with equal ferocity.
– Lawrance Jeppson |
Martial Law
After the Sunset
2015 年 7 月 28 日