Friday, March 20, 2009

What is wrong with this picture?


This photo was taken in a Rome church. The permanent/main altar seen on the left was designed and built by the one and only Michelangelo. Meanwhile...
...meanwhile, we see that it is not used. Instead, this clutter of which an Italian art historian colleague of ours calls the "prevailing bunk of having no taste" is what is instead used.
The pretypify of having no taste? Mum always said: "Kids, make sure everything matches."
The next time you enter such a historic downtown baroque parish as this and notice such mod candles as these, such a dining room chair as this, an ambo of this sort, such a stool and lumber platform as seen here, just feel bad and instruct your kids to do better.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

It's amazing to me the extent to which people were driven by the post-V2 ideologies and slogans regarding the liturgy...it led them to institute such preposterous situations as this one. Really, we're abandoning Michelangelo for some table?

TheSeeker said...

That's like saying, "No thanks to the free filet mignon...I've got a hankerin for some good ol' McDonalds!" Imagine...giving Michaelangelo the brush....

Anonymous said...

That is the church with one of two heds of the Baptist! It is Irish priests who are in charge of things there.

Anonymous said...

What church? Where in Rome?

Anonymous said...

This is indeed SAD.
I very much apreciate the fact that Vatican II allowed many old traditions (speaking outside of Rome) to show up again... since celebrating 'versus the people' was the norm in many places before the whole Tridentine reform with its altars against the walls with predellas and stacked candles on the predella from tallest to smallest on the sides of the cross, etc.
BUT tradition is tradition, and in Rome, as well as all those places already built and fournished with such beautiful altars as in this photograph - and altar rails etc. -it is indeed sad to see these anachronistic choir-altars...
this is yet another case of Christ pointing to the moon and everyone looking at his finger instead...