R
Ridgerunner
Guest
This is certainly possible. I recall once going into a very old church. I was looking at some of the images and suddenly realized that, in the stations, every “good guy” looks like a northern Italian, and every “bad guy” looks like a Sicilian. No exceptions. Probably the artist (they were original paintings) was a northern Italian who just saw things that way for whatever reasons he had for doing it. Possibly it wasn’t even conscious on his part. But then one considers the fact that many Sicilians are descended from Levantines which, to people like the artist, might have conveyed a vaguely threatening aspect.Perhaps the reason that Satan is painted as North African or Turkish is because they were Muslim whereas the lighter Europeans were Catholic. Makes sense to me
It is intriguing that, except for portrayals of Our Lady of Guadalupe and Juan Diego, statues and paintings from Mexico portray Jesus and others as very light-skinned (though usually dark haired).
But one has to realize that, among many Hispanics, that Crillo/Mestizo/Indio assumption of status is still there. So, perhaps one would portray Jesus as “pure Spanish” because doing so conveys an underlying message of nobility, and it might have simply become a conventional thing in time.
It’s interesting that Our Lady of Guadalupe is always portrayed as dark-skinned. It is my understanding that that fact conveys a lot about Mexican history and the “resurrection” if you will, or “salvation” of the Mestizos and Indios who, at the time of her appearance, felt themselves on the verge of extinction in favor of the “pure Spanish”; perhaps even despised by God.