Statue with a gay kiss exposed in the church removed after the controversy – Chronicle

SERAVEZZA. For ten days the two statues faced each other. Behind the face of Jesus Christ; in front of the half-length of two men kissing each other. Sacred love and secular love, one meter at most one inside the other, inside the house of the lord: a church. Precisely the Romanesque church of San Martino ad Azzano (Seravezza), also called the church of Michelangelo as it is said that the master carved the rose that adorns it. Nearby, in recent days, dozens of works by international Italian artists have been installed for the two days of art (yesterday and today) "Anteprima Cibart", which is now a consolidated event in Haute-Versilia. However, one of these works was installed inside the church. And it is precisely "Polaroid", the homobadual kiss of Emanuele Giannelli, a pietrasino artist of adoption. Open sky. The priest, Don Hermes, did not move, he agreed, the parishioners too – he says – but some visitors do not. So "to avoid a controversy that would have ruined the party, we decided to remove it," says Matteo Marchetti, president of Cibart. Yesterday, for the beginning of the exhibition, Giannelli's work was thrown into the church garden.

L & # 39; s work. Polaroid "is a work of two or three years ago, dedicated to the kiss as the prime emotion of the human being, which gives rise to a series of chemical reactions," says Giannelli, a sculptor who lives for years in Versilia. has jumped to artistic chronicles with his Visionari and Sospesi, resin works that reproduce life-size men, with sunglbades or hung upside down on the rivers. "The kiss is a gesture of love – he continues – that is between two people of any gender or not. I did not care about homobaduality, even if it makes sense. The gesture of the kiss in the art, like those of Rodin or Klimt "

The position of the priest The Tyrrhenian tried to contact the bishop of Pisa to know his opinion, but without receiving Father Don Hermes Luppi was not scandalized, indeed, he was proud and now invites tolerance. "The church proves what it was born for: the wider destiny things. These days, there are Chinese artists and German sculptors working here, and so many works of art – he says -. Even Michelangelo was also forced to cover the shame of the Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel. Art, philosophy and religion are always open to home. It's the narrowness that sets the limits. "And then he adds," Already the Gospel of 2000 has taught us tolerance, and that the spirit must blow where it wants to. " freedom. "None of his parishioners, he says, complained about the sculpture.

Controversy. Yet, some did. There are those who did it on social media, raising the limits of freedom of the art. Those who did it to the old: protest to the organizers. "Maybe have we made a risky decision to put this work inside the church, "said Cibart's president," but we decided to turn it off, just to avoid feeding a case. "And there it is now. –