On his Facebook page, Giovanni Gasparro calls his painting - "The Martyrdom of St. Simon of Trent by Jewish Ritual Murder"
All images below are from Facebook
Note: The first image below has now been censored by Facebook and doesn't show the whole painting.
Note: The first image below has now been censored by Facebook and doesn't show the whole painting.
The controversial subject of the painting has been well documented.
Simon of Trent, who was born in 1472, was murdered on 21st March 1475, aged two. His father claimed that he had been kidnapped and murdered by the local Jewish community.
The Jewish community in Trent, a town in northern Italy, was composed of the three households of Samuel, Tobias, and Engel. Samuel was a moneylender and Tobias was a physician. The little boy was abducted from outside his house during Holy Week on Maundy-Thursday, the day before Good Friday, while his parents were at church.
He was taken to the house of Samuel where he was unmercifully butchered. While he was being strangled with a handkerchief, pieces of flesh were cut from his neck and the blood collected in a bowl. They then cut pieces of flesh from the boy’s arm and legs and collected the blood in pots. Finally the torturers imitated the crucifixion by holding the twitching body upside down with the arms outstretched.
Simon's body was discovered by Seligman, a cook, in the cellar of Samuel on Easter Sunday 1475.
The butchering of the boy Simon is graphically displayed in Gasparro's painting.
He was taken to the house of Samuel where he was unmercifully butchered. While he was being strangled with a handkerchief, pieces of flesh were cut from his neck and the blood collected in a bowl. They then cut pieces of flesh from the boy’s arm and legs and collected the blood in pots. Finally the torturers imitated the crucifixion by holding the twitching body upside down with the arms outstretched.
Simon's body was discovered by Seligman, a cook, in the cellar of Samuel on Easter Sunday 1475.
The butchering of the boy Simon is graphically displayed in Gasparro's painting.
The entire Jewish community of Trent (both men and women) were arrested and confessed under torture, not only to the crime of murdering the child, but also to blood libel, or the accusation that due to Jewish contempt for Christianity, Jews murder Christian children in order to use their blood for religious rituals.
Fifteen of the Jews, including Samuel, the head of the community, were sentenced to death and burnt at the stake. The records of the trial are kept in the Vatican where they are available for examination.
The subject has been painted before but never so graphically detailed. For example, there is a painting by Guiseppe Alberti in the Museo Diocesano Tridentino painted in 1677.
There are numerous cases of blood libel reported in the past centuries, with several reported cases in England.
Simon of Trent was canonized in the year 1588 by Pope Sixtus V. At the end of the second Vatican Council in 1965 (when the Catholic church lost its way), Simon’s name was removed from the Calendar of Saints and attempts were made by the reformers in the Vatican to remove his martyr status because of Jewish sensitivities.
Gasparro unveiled the painting on his facebook page on March 24, the traditional Feast Day of St. Simon, thereby showing his contempt for the disastrous reforms of Vatican II.
Leaving aside the controversial subject of the picture, the 7ft X 5ft painting has been skilfully executed and is a masterpiece of the Baroque style of painting. Unlike most modern artists who churn out pretentious rubbish, Gasparro can actually paint!
Gasparro has painted several papel portraits including a portrait of Pope Pius X.
Pope Pius X was head of the Catholic Church from August 1903 to his death in 1914. Pius X is known for vigorously opposing modernist interpretations of Catholic doctrine, promoting liturgical reforms and orthodox theology.
In 1970, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre rejected the reforms of the Second Vatican Council and formed the Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX) named after the anti-modernist Pope Pius X. SSPX favours Traditional Catholicism and retains the traditional Latin Mass.
The catholic artist Giovanni Gasparro was born in the Adriatic port city of Bari in southern Italy on 22 October 1983 and was baptized on 18 December of the same year. He graduated at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome in 2007, as a pupil of the painter Giuseppe Modica, with a thesis in art history on the Roman stay of the Flemish Baroque artist Anthony van Dyck. His first solo exhibition was in Paris in 2009. He has won numerous awards and his works are exhibited in important European and American public and private collections as well as in several Italian churches and basilicas including Siena, Trani and Rome.
He is only 36 years old and may well be the world's greatest living artist.
The subject has been painted before but never so graphically detailed. For example, there is a painting by Guiseppe Alberti in the Museo Diocesano Tridentino painted in 1677.
There are numerous cases of blood libel reported in the past centuries, with several reported cases in England.
Simon of Trent was canonized in the year 1588 by Pope Sixtus V. At the end of the second Vatican Council in 1965 (when the Catholic church lost its way), Simon’s name was removed from the Calendar of Saints and attempts were made by the reformers in the Vatican to remove his martyr status because of Jewish sensitivities.
Gasparro unveiled the painting on his facebook page on March 24, the traditional Feast Day of St. Simon, thereby showing his contempt for the disastrous reforms of Vatican II.
Leaving aside the controversial subject of the picture, the 7ft X 5ft painting has been skilfully executed and is a masterpiece of the Baroque style of painting. Unlike most modern artists who churn out pretentious rubbish, Gasparro can actually paint!
Gasparro has painted several papel portraits including a portrait of Pope Pius X.
Pope Pius X was head of the Catholic Church from August 1903 to his death in 1914. Pius X is known for vigorously opposing modernist interpretations of Catholic doctrine, promoting liturgical reforms and orthodox theology.
In 1970, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre rejected the reforms of the Second Vatican Council and formed the Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX) named after the anti-modernist Pope Pius X. SSPX favours Traditional Catholicism and retains the traditional Latin Mass.
The catholic artist Giovanni Gasparro was born in the Adriatic port city of Bari in southern Italy on 22 October 1983 and was baptized on 18 December of the same year. He graduated at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome in 2007, as a pupil of the painter Giuseppe Modica, with a thesis in art history on the Roman stay of the Flemish Baroque artist Anthony van Dyck. His first solo exhibition was in Paris in 2009. He has won numerous awards and his works are exhibited in important European and American public and private collections as well as in several Italian churches and basilicas including Siena, Trani and Rome.
He is only 36 years old and may well be the world's greatest living artist.
References:
Giovanni Gasparro on Facebook
Giovanni Gasparro on Instagram
Jewish groups claim the painting is anti-Semitic:
The Times of Israel
The Algemeiner
