Publication: The Telegraph
Date: March 12, 2005
A French fashion poster showing women imitating Jesus Christ and his apostles in the Leonardo da Vinci painting, The Last Supper, has been banned in Paris, the second time in a month it has been outlawed.
Milan had banned the poster in February as a parody of a key event in Christian history. The Last Supper depicts Christ’s farewell to his disciples.
A court ordered the fashion house, Marithe and Francois Girbaud, yesterday to remove the posters within three days as it offended Catholics.
The French Bishops’ Conference brought the complaint against the poster. The Catholic daily La Croix quoted the association’s lawyer as saying the poster did “great injury because it represents the Last Supper in denigrating conditions”
The poster shows women in chic casual clothes seated at a table in postures mimicking da Vinci’s famous painting. To the right of the Christ figure in the poster, a woman embraces a shirtless man in jeans.
Defence lawyers asked why the Church did nothing against Dan Brown’s bestseller, The Da Vinci Code where he argues that Jesus had married his follower Mary Magdelene and the Church had conspired to hide this.
The shiftless man seems to be a play on Brown’s argument that the man seated to the right of Christ in the painting assumed to be the apostle, John - was actually Mary Magdelene. By turning the other disciples into women, the poster hints that the man being embraced represents Jesus.
