Word: crucifixions
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...London picture, he blesses the bread with a restrained hand. His blue-green garment is keyed to the picture's muted brown palette. This is what we mean by late Caravaggio, made under the shadow of his worsening predicaments. Yet in Naples, he produced astonishing canvases like his Crucifixion of St. Andrew. The saint is shown at the moment of his miraculous death, when soldiers attempting to take him down from the cross alive (which would deny him the martyr's death he prayed for) were thwarted when God froze them in a blinding flash of light. Here Caravaggio...
...story begins with the rediscovery of the “Spear of Destiny,” presumably the lance that pierced Jesus’ side during his crucifixion, here a mystical talisman that “Corinthians 17” predicts will usher in the rein of Mammon, son of Lucifer. (Don’t bother looking it up; it only exists, according to the film, in the version of the Bible found in Hell.) Such unabashedly bogus uses of Christian jargon pepper the movie: the gift of prophecy becomes the hottest new tool in forensics and criminology; while...
...reconcile his new passions--physics and religion--his reputation began its serious decline. And it can't be denied that his newly rediscovered Catholic piety led to some cheesy and meretricious paintings, like the portraits of his wife Gala as the Virgin. But it also produced the magnificent crucifixions of the early 1950s. With its sources in Zurbarn, Caravaggio and Velzquez, and with its hint of movie-camera angles that never quite happened in the movies, Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubicus) is one of the handful of truly powerful devotional images of 20th century...
...understand why people of the Middle East responded to Abu Ghraib with horror, one needs to recall the legacies of state violence in this region over the centuries. In the beginning, Muslim states did not carry forward many of the worst tortures (including crucifixion) of the Persian and Roman empires they replaced. They did introduce tortures of their own, from the amputation of limbs to the common beating of the soles of the feet, the falaka, that are cruel by our standards. But Muslim societies were guided by ideals and values that Westerners can recognize and which still animate penal...
...Ancient Tortures. For the West, crucifixion is a religious symbol, but in the Middle East, this was a real punishment that cast a long shadow. Greek historians tell us that the Persians invented crucifixion around 2500 years ago, but other empires soon adopted it. The ancients regarded this as the worst of executions. Crucifixions displayed victims naked in public without honor. They subjected victims to the vengeful feelings of a crowd, allowing them to take pleasure in pain and breach the bonds of civility. They extended suffering for days. They left victims as food for wild beasts and birds, denying...