Word: christ
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST In an age of post-Christian facetiousness, Martin Scorsese's work daringly attempts to restore passion and melodrama to the Gospel story. Protests notwithstanding, the film is an affirmation of faith in the power of both the Gospel and the movies...
...love of the real Tuscan landscape does shine through. The Osservanza Master's The Resurrection, in which Christ flies out of the sepulcher in a blaze of gold glory, watched by the prostrated Roman soldiers, is rendered magical by the red flush of early dawn that appears along the black profile of the hills. In a panel of another broken-up altarpiece, Saint Anthony rejects the temptations of a pile of gold the Devil put in his path. The gold, however, was for some reason scraped off and repainted as earth, so that the saint appears to be overreacting...
...background of Saint Anthony Tempted by a Heap of Gold are hardly the result of fantasy and are recognizably based on the gullies and crests of Le Crete, the bare hills southeast of Siena. And by the end of the quattrocento, in Benvenuto di Giovanni's image of Christ on his way to Calvary, the landscape is real and full of fantastical character: a Roman soldier like an armed Boschian lobster, tormentors pulling and grabbing at Christ, knots of rope, pebbles underfoot -- each bearing its own color and polish, like a cabochon stone...
...with its slender columns and bladelike ribs, in which the theologian Saint Thomas Aquinas kneels in prayer, is like a visual gloss on his own syllogisms. An educated Sienese would have known that Aquinas had the habit of praying before he wrote. In another panel Sassetta showed Aquinas asking Christ what he thought of his book on the nature of the Eucharist, and receiving the approval of the Supreme Editor. The Sienese sophisticate would also have connected the well visible in the courtyard with the sacrament of baptism, and the cloister itself with the Earthly Paradise. For a modern viewer...
Perhaps it began when Washington Redskins Coach Joe Gibbs, a fundamentalist Christian, called for the destruction of "The Last Temptation of Christ." In return, God wreaked vengeance upon the Redskins...