Exhibition Outing Gore

Last week Lisa Milroy took us to see the 'Sacred Made Real' exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery.  After dodging a myriad of mangled-guilt-inducing crucifixes (the ones the spanish are so well known for) I came across this gem...a delicately carved pair of statues of wood and wax depicting St. Francis Borgia and St.Ignatias Layola, who were originally holding crosses and skulls in their expressive hands.  But they could just as easily have been sashaying down a runway with Karl Lagerfeld or been starring as extras in the Matrix.

St Francis Borgia, 1624 and St.Ignatius Loyola, 1610 by Juan Martinez Montañés and Francisco Pacheco

Apart from that the exhbition was filled with old age pensioners, some downright strange stuff (like the virgin mary lactating milk into a grown man's mouth) and plenty of gore. Like this macabre head for example, complete with intricate detail of severed jugulars:

I thought it was probably a severed "Goliath" head, but on closer inspection of the title, it was actually St.John the Baptist...I didn't remember ever learning he met an untimely death? Even stranger the original was modeled on an actual freshly decapitated criminal's head ("as a lot of people were decaptitated in those days" ).  What a weird contradiction.  If Jake & Dinos Chapman had been incarnated 1,000 yrs ago in Catholic Spain, one can't help thinking they most likely would've been working for the church...

These images weren't in the show, but I thought I'd put them in anyway (both St.Ignatius Loyola)