In 2007 the Italo-Canadian artist Cosimo Cavallaro secured free publicity with the condemnation by idiot American Catholic reactionaries of his harmless chocolate Jesus.
Here in Spain, you can have an entire chocolate Nativity scene, as a normal expression of commercially-tinged religious sentimentality. In fact a whole 1,450 kilo sugar Nativity Granada, in a chocolate factory in the small Andalusian town of Rute. (The other industry is anis.)
The Nativity is rather nicely put into the Court of the Lions in the Alhambra.
I liked the urban chocolate fountain and the multiply inaccurate ham bodegas and marzipan pigs wandering the streets.
Photos credit Lu Mendonça (aka Mrs W)
Saccharine would be the wrong word. Soft-centred, yes.
Author: James Wimberley
James Wimberley (b. 1946, an Englishman raised in the Channel Islands. three adult children) is a former career international bureaucrat with the Council of Europe in Strasbourg. His main achievements there were the Lisbon Convention on recognition of qualifications and the Kosovo law on school education. He retired in 2006 to a little white house in Andalucia, His first wife Patricia Morris died in 2009 after a long illness. He remarried in 2011. to the former Brazilian TV actress Lu Mendonça. The cat overlords are now three.
I suppose I've been invited to join real scholars on the list because my skills, acquired in a decade of technical assistance work in eastern Europe, include being able to ask faux-naïf questions like the exotic Persians and Chinese of eighteenth-century philosophical fiction. So I'm quite comfortable in the role of country-cousin blogger with a European perspective. The other specialised skill I learnt was making toasts with a moral in the course of drunken Caucasian banquets. I'm open to expenses-paid offers to retell Noah the great Armenian and Columbus, the orange, and university reform in Georgia.
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Mintz’s “Sweetness and Power” (http://www.amazon.com/Sweetness-Power-Place-Modern-History/dp/0140092331, has a terrific discussion of “frivolities.” That is, model castles, palaces, cities, built out of sugar to show wealth and power back when sugar was exceedingly pricy. Apparently, the tradition continues, at least in Spain.
Looking forward to reading the piece. These sugary constructions are strangely transgressive: the attraction is that they are potentially desirable foodstuffs, but have in a way ceased to be so by diversion into the raw material of art. Cf. the witch’s gingerbread house in Hansel and Gretel. This is German or Alsatian gingerbread, a rigid aerated material roughly like polystyrene board that you could at a pinch build with, not the spongy (but far more edible) British sort.
In regard to chocolate Jesus, where would one get the idea of the body of the Christ as foodstuff?
Can the contention of blasphemy be [tran]substantiated?
The use of the word in the title was ironical. If there is such a sin or social offence as blasphemy, it’s clear that neither of my examples meet any plausible test, unlike say Serrano’s “Piss Christ”.
I was hoping some readers might react to the pigs.