this week, along comes Pope Benedict XVI who threw a real ecclesiastical spanner in the works. Did you see that incredible photograph, taken a few hours after his resignation speech? An electrical storm was raging across Rome and this amazing bolt of lightning is seen striking the very top of the cupola on top of St Peter's. It looks so eerie, almost literally heaven sent.
But in the absolute torrent of words that's been pouring forth since the news came about the Pope on February 11th, that he intends to resign
from the Papacy as of Friday evening, February 28th, a really good story
about the Pope and the Vatican seems to have been missed by the media. Has no-one ever heard of the prophecies of St Malachy, the cleric who was an archbishop of Armagh in Ireland in the 12th century?
He wrote a whole series of prophecies about future Popes and in the centuries since, they've often been proven perfectly accurate. But it's his prophecy about the pope who comes after Benedict XVI that's really striking. By Easter, we should know who the new Pope is, but if St Malachy is
right, then the new Pope is in for a hard time. Malachy says that the next Pope will be the last and that the seven hills of Rome will be destroyed, marking the end of both the Papacy and the Catholic church.
Meanwhile, on matters artistic, there's also been plenty happening in recent days. In 1866, a French painter called Gustave Courbet painted something that caused great outrage at the time. The painting
is called L'Origine du Monde and shows the lower half of a naked woman. The painting looks rather revolting for the simple reason the model has an absolute mass of genital hair, which is a general turn-off these days. There was much speculation at the time that the model was an Irishwoman called
Joanna (Jo) Hiffernan, known in Paris as La Belle Irlandaise. But people who know about these things now say that it couldn't possibly be her, since she was a natural red head.
The other intriguing part of the story is that for years, the top half of the painting was missing. However, someone says he picked it up a couple of years ago in a bric-a-brac shop in Paris for
€1,400. This piece of the painting has been verified by the world's leading expert on Courbet and if
he's right, this portion of the painting could now be worth €40 million. The painting has only been on permanent display within the last 20 years; it's in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, which is planning a
major exhibition centred around the painting, next year.
As for Courbet, he was quite the little revolutionary and during the Paris Commune of 1871, he was put in charge of the museums in Paris. He wanted to pull down the great Napoleonic column in the Place Vendome, which was done, but in 1877, long after the commune had been banished into history, the city council decided to restore the column and send the bill, in 33 instalments, to Courbet. The painter, who was addicted to heavy drinking, conveniently died the day before the first instalment was due; there must be a moral in that!
What was interesting was how the media covered this particular story. In France, newspapers and websites like Le Figaro thought nothing of showing all of the painting. For Paris Match, it was a world exclusive, so naturally, they put the painting in all its genital glory on its front cover. People on the Continent are often much more relaxed about the workings of the body, a much more sensible attitude, and I always remember the time we were staying in the delightful Normandy town of Valognes, near Cherbourg. One day, we were walking down the road from the railway station to the centre ville, when an elderly man, who looked like a farm worker, came along. He was in urgent need of relieving himself and promptly pissed against a wall in full view of all the passersby, including ourselves, without the slightest hestitation or shame, and no-one thought any the worse of him.
Yet in the media in the UK and Ireland, prurience reigns and everyone went out of the
way to be so coy about Courbet. The Irish Independent newspaper and website for instance, showed a photo of the world expert on Courbet, but little detail of the famous painting. Such faux coyness often verges on the ridiculous.
The other recent French story about art came from Lens, the former coal mining city in north-eastern France, where the new branch of the Louvre was only opened in December. One of its works is the famous Delacroix 1830 painting, Liberty leads the People, which shows a bare-breasted woman carrying the tricolour and leading the mob. The painting represented the July, 1830
revolution in Paris. A woman in the art gallery put a graffiti sticker on the painting, which fortunately didn't do any lasting damage. It turns out the sticker represents a group called AE911, which through
its website, ae911truth.org, wants the US Congress to have an enquiry into what really happened on 9/11. They say that the attacks that day were the result of a conspiracy and had nothing to do with Islamists.
My final painterly note this week is about the Picasso Museum, which was founded in 1985 in the Hotel Salé in the third arrondissement. It's undergoing a major revamp and the latest news is that it is due to reopen to the public this summer, with over 500 works by Picasso on four levels. But don't bank on this opening date actually happening; dates for such construction projects have a nasty habit of going south! But we were very amused when we visited the museum in its original form some years ago; one of the exhibits was made up of some of Picasso's laundry lists. Any takers for my shopping lists?
Something else we had a look at in France many years ago was the Bayeux Tapestry in Normandy. This shows 1066 and all that, but the tapestry was never finished. What is on display is most interesting, in an interesting Normandy town, where it's been since 1945. Now 400 of the good burghers of Alderney in the Channel Islands have stitched together the missing section, showing the
coronation of William the Conqueror after the Norman invasion of England, and it's been put in the Alderney museum.
Alderney itself is a strange island. When we went there, we were mystified because there was such a palpable eerie feeling around the harbour area; we didn't find out until later that during the World War II occupation of the Channel Islands by the Nazis, many frightful atrocities had taken place in
this part of Alderney.
Just to end on a funny peculiar note. The other day, I was reading the website of the French language Tribune de Geneve, a very respectable newspaper. I spotted a headline to the effect that a top Swiss
chef had allegedly been making a cake from shit. For one split second, I thought, dear me, the standards of haute cuisine in Switzerland are really dropping. But of course shit is a slang word for heroin and what this chef was supposed to have done was bake a cake laced with heroin, which of course made the two women who ate it very ill and needing hospitalisation.
These days you just don't know what story is going to come up in a very uncertain world, which of course makes life much easier for bloggers!