Too Sexy for Milan

Via ArtsJournal comes news that the city of Milan has banned a billboard depicting a female Jesus and apostles at the Last Supper:

"We rejected a request to put up this huge billboard after getting a negative opinion from Italy's advertising self-regulating body," said Maurilio Sartor, the head of the publicity office at the Milan municipality.

"Had they given us the go-ahead, we would have put it up," he added.

Marithe et Francois Girbaud fashion house, makers of hideously ugly clothes, ran the parody of the Leonardo painting as "a tribute to women and their role in society." (I think that's the idea anyway: Since the girls are seated at what looks like an art-deco coffee bar, I wouldn't even have recognized it as a Last Supper knockoff if the article hadn't identified it as such.) As I've been under the impression that the only practicing Catholic left in Italy was the Pope, I'm also surprised that this was deemed offensive; but then I never would have expected the freewheeling Italians to have an advertising-decency censorship board either.

Scandal completists may notice that this dustup has some elements in common with the controversy over Renee Cox's Yo Mama's Last Supper, in which Jesus was not only female but buck naked and depicted in a style of photography you rarely see outside of foto-novelos in Spanish. But the real inspiration here seems to have come from that gift keeps on giving—Dan Brown's The DaVinci Code, with its argument that the evangelist John was actually a woman, or something like that.

The real Last Supper mystery remains: Why would 13 guys dine while sitting all on the same side of the table? What an awkward way to have dinner.