Art or Pornography?
Director fired for showing naked sculpture
David statue by Michelangelo in the Galleria dell’Accademia
© TravelFlow / Adobe Stock
Michelangelo’s world-famous statue of David is said to be to blame for the fact that a school principal in the USA lost her job. The accusation: With the statue she would have shown the children in the 6th grade pornography.
Parents at the Florida school have complained about the content of the lesson, and one parent is said to have even described the picture of Michelangelo’s David as “pornographic”. The school in question appears to have a protocol that says parents must be notified in a letter if their children are shown classical works of art, the former principal told the Huffington Post. Due to “a series of misunderstandings”, the letter was not sent to the parents of the sixth graders, which led to a number of complaints.
Parents in the US have the right to know what is being shown to children
“Parents’ rights come first and that means the interests of all parents must be protected, whether there are one, ten, 20 or 50 parents,” school board chair Barney Bishop told the regional newspaper ” Tallahassee Democrat”. In an interview with the “Huffington Post”, he added that the matter was just one of several incidents with the director.
The fact that the David statue is inspired by the biblical story of David versus Goliath is apparently ignored here, the focus is on the naked man. Reports have now reached Florence, the city where the original is in the Galleria dell’Accademia. Even the mayor, Dario Nardella, is outraged and tweets: “Confusing art with pornography is just ridiculous”. He will invite the former director to Florence “to pay tribute to her on behalf of the city. Art is civilization and those who teach it deserve respect.”
Equating nudity with pornography is “absurd”
The director of the Galleria dell’Accademia, Cecilie Hollberg, said it was absurd to equate nudity with pornography. The David statue is the symbol of the Renaissance that puts man in all his immaculateness, as created by God, at the center. David is also a religious figure. “To make an association with pornography requires a distorted imagination.”
The marble statue was created between 1501 and 1504. It was carved from a single block of marble and is over five meters high. It shows the biblical David at the moment when he is about to take up the fight against the giant Goliath with the slingshot.
Sources used: dpa.de