Paper: Italian Church Attack Plotted

Take 2:

A Fresco Too Far: Islamic Radicals Target the Renaissance

The Asian Wall Street Journal Friday, July 13, 2001

By Alberto Carosa

When the Afghan Taliban five months ago were busy dynamiting the gigantic third- and fifth-century statues of Buddha carved in the mountainside at Bamiyan, a few commentators asked the question: What's next? Now we know. An Islamic fundamentalist group known as Unione dei Musulmani d'Italia (Italy's Union of Muslims) is demanding that a priceless 15th-century fresco be removed from the church where it is housed, the 14th-century Cathedral of San Petronio in Bologna. Like the Taliban, these radicals are claiming the art of another religion is "obscene and blasphemous" to Islam and so must be done away with.

The fresco in question depicts the 6th century founder of Islam, Mohammed, burning in the flames of hell. It was painted by the early Renaissance master Giovanni da Modena on the wall of the Bolognini chapel as part of a wider scene based on the Last Judgement, showing hell with a monstrous Lucifer reigning over his lair, munching on sinners. To his left, a grimacing, horned demon drags the tiny Mohammed down to the Underworld. The Unione claims that this fresco is even more offensive than Salman Rushdie's "Satanic Verses," the 1988 novel that so irritated Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini that the distraught zealot passed a fatwa -- or death sentence -- on the hapless author's head.

"A new Rushdie case? Perhaps, but only six centuries late," the Italian daily il Giornale noted on June 27. According to that paper, this whole hubbub started on June 7 when Italy's Union of Muslims wrote to Pope John Paul II and Cardinal Giacomo Biffi, the archbishop of Bologna, demanding that the fresco be destroyed and the Catholic Church apologize to the Islamic community, "in much the same way as your pontiff John Paul II has already asked for pardon from the Jews and Orthodox Greeks." Having not received the requested Vatican groveling, the group is threatening mass anti-Catholic demonstrations across Italy.

In Rome, Nabil Baioni, director of the moderate Islamic Cultural Center, strikes a more judicious note, pointing out that most Muslims probably don't want to destroy art. "I've lived here 40 years and never noticed the image before now," he said. But, of course, many Muslims didn't want the millennia-old Bamiyan Buddhas destroyed either; danger foments when small, vocal fundamentalist groups realize they can get publicity and recruits for their cause by staking out the fringes.

And in Italy the radicals are already targeting their next cultural icon for destruction: the works of Dante Alighieri, Italy's national poet. In demanding that Giovanni da Modena's fresco be pulverized, the Unione blamed the perceived anti-Islamic sentiment of modern Italians on Dante, who in the Middle Ages placed Mohammed in the ninth circle of hell in the 28th Canto of his masterpiece, "The Inferno." While it is true that the fretted-over fresco was based on this 14th-century work, the would-be vandals neglect to mention that both Dante and Giovanni damned plenty of their fellow Catholics in their depictions of hell, including a smattering of priests, a pope or two, and even a canonized saint. As far as eternal perdition was concerned, these medireview artists were equal opportunity judges. Despite this fact, the Unione demands that Dante not be taught in many Italian schools.

So is this movement a threat to some of the world's finest art treasures or not? The World Muslim League, through its spokesman, pooh-poohed the campaign as "pure madness" and "more than silly." But Roberto de Mattei, president of the Rome-based think tank Centro Culturale Lepanto, offers a more dire opinion. "The demand exposes the aggressive nature of Islamic fundamentalism," he argues, "which never has renounced its goal to dominate Europe one day. What other explanation is there for attempts to destroy Italy's cultural heritage?"

The fact that the row erupted in Bologna may not be coincidental. Last September, Cardinal Biffi kicked up a religious-social tempest when he issued a pastoral letter sounding the alarm on what he called a "Muslim invasion." In a nutshell His Eminence stated that it would be nice if immigrants admitted to Italy were Catholic, to "save the nation's identity." Rejecting accusations that his suggestion violates the right of religious freedom, he said, "A country can let who it wants into its house." Anti-Islamic feelings were further fueled by the Northern League -- now part of the center-right government led by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi -- which has campaigned on an anti-immigrant platform and has called for the defense of Christian society against outside influences.

It is important to note that -- vandalism aside -- Giovanni's fresco isn't going anywhere anytime soon. The spokesman of the Archdiocese of Bologna confirmed that even if the cardinal wanted to modify or erase the fresco, he would not be allowed. In Italy, all public monuments, including the Bologna basilica and most churches, are state property; the approval of the Ministry of Culture is needed to move even a single stone. The same applies to Dante's poetry: Italian school syllabi are decided by the Ministry of Public Education -- and it's highly unlikely that the new center-right government would ever consider a request to dump the beloved master poet.

To say the least, there are lots of ingredients stewing in this boiling pot of culture. But politics aside, the issue now is art. Why target one of the most significant works of the early Italian Renaissance if the beef is supposedly with a public figure or political agenda? Cardinal Biffi -- despite his oft-expressed hankering for Italy to remain a relatively homogenous country -- frankly had no control over the coincidence that one of his episcopal predecessors commissioned a fresco from Giovanni da Modena in 1415.

There is also the niggling annoyance of historical revisionism. The medireview artist merely reproduced iconography depicting the popular medireview vision of hell. Expecting art from the 15th century to jibe with modernist notions of multiculturalism, political correctness, hyper-sensitivity, style and -- dare I say -- tedium is patently preposterous. Should we next trash the nativity because the Virgin Mary was a stay-at-home mom? Surely that scene is offensive to feminists. . . Mr. Carosa is a journalist in Rome.

(An AWSJ Culture & Thought feature for Friday-Sunday, July 13-15, 2001.)

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