Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 234

Dear Obama, art history can earn you megabucks. But so what?

The US president has apologised to an art historian for saying her career choice isn't lucrative. But once you raise the issue of money, the deeper value of culture gets left behind

Barack Obama has apologised in writing to an art historian after he appeared to disparage the subject in a speech. The president said people could earn more with manufacturing skills "than they might with an art history degree".

He has since explained that he did not mean to run down art history, a subject he loved at school and which has brought him "joy". But it's the old argument all over again: practical v cultural studies, vocational v inspirational education.

I've been hearing this debate all my life. My dad taught design, craft and technology. Was the purpose of such classes to impart skills or to inspire creativity? What about the ideals of William Morris, for whom artistic education was a way to change society? Such educational questions were debated at the dinner table.

I managed to study A levels with almost no practical application – history, English and Latin – and to study history at university. But art history? Wow, that really did sound useless.

I sometimes went to the library of the art history faculty and it seemed full of posh students planning their next fox hunt. Art history at that time was considered a soft degree for the aristocracy – even the monarchy: it is after all what Prince William went to university to study, though he changed to geography.

But this is an out-of-date perception. Today, art history degrees and postgraduate courses are full of students who are anything but idlers. After all, if we're talking careers, if we're talking money – has Obama not read The Birth of the Big, Beautiful Art Market, an essay from Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy by American art critic Dave Hickey?

Auction houses, art galleries and even art magazines all exist to turn art history into cash. The art world is big and booming and it needs knowledgable experts to grease its wheels. If the private sector is not for you, the museums sector also has opportunities for art historians.

It's just inaccurate to define art history as beautiful escapism in today's economy. In these troubled times, the art market has been one of the most resilient industries. Better than working in Detroit, for sure.

Only ... what about that "joy" the President speaks of? What about the power of art to change lives and worlds? As soon as one argues for its pecuniary value, the deeper, human worth of culture is left behind. Modern politics has no words to praise cultural education for its mind-expanding redemptive magic.

Art history can make you rich. But please don't study it for that reason.

ArtUnited StatesCareersHistory and history of artJonathan Jones
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The art of camouflage – spot the sniper

A series of photographs featuring camouflaged snipers shows how subtle the art of disguise has become. In this new age of trickery, could the invisibility cloak become a reality?

• Test yourself with Simon Menner's sniper pictures

If you think you have 20/20 vision, think again. Camouflage works by exploiting the weaknesses of human perception. Most of us rely on our eyesight as our first and best guide to the world around us – Leonardo da Vinci claimed it is worse to lose your sight than any of your other senses because we orient ourselves visually.

Yet these pictures by Simon Menner demonstrate how unreliable our eyes actually are. They show snipers hiding in a variety of landscapes. Would you notice any of them without the red circles locating their whereabouts? Can you even see them with the aid of the prompts?

This is simple scientific trickery. Our brains just don't decode visual information as efficiently as we think they do. A broken pattern, or a confusion of depth and flatness caused by illusory shadows, or just a subtle blending of colours can make the visible invisible. Designers of camouflage have been researching and exploiting such optical illusions since the first world war – yet another reason to mark the centenary of its outbreak. One of the first uses of camouflage in 1914-18 was to disguise dreadnought battleships by painting them with giant Futurist markings to shatter their outlines in the water. A century on, the art of disguise has – these pictures prove – become a lot more subtle than such early efforts.

So subtle, in fact, that these invisible snipers are just the beginning of a strange age of human ethereality. Designers are working right now on a Harry Potter style "invisibility cloak" that can be 3D printed. The principles of camouflage can be translated to a nano scale by such technology, confusing the mind at a microscopic level.

It's just another step in humanity's imitation of the inborn skills of other animals through technology. Just as we learned to fly in emulation of birds, the art of camouflage is copied from reptiles and insects whose broken coloured patterns fit into the vegetation around them. Beware the sniper in the grass.

• Test your eyes with more of Simon Renner's sniper photographsPhotographyJonathan Jones
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Strange Beauty – review

National Gallery
Exhibition of work by German renaissance artists raises questions about the period but fails to offer anything new

Visitors to this exhibition will be confronted by something strange and disturbing. Sadly it is not a dark and imaginative work of art by Albrecht Altdorfer or Lucas Cranach, but the grotesque spectacle of a great art gallery vanishing up its own fundamentals.

The German Renaissance is fantastic and compelling, torn between religious revolution, medieval folkore and the new ideas about perspective, myth and nudity coming out of Italy 500 years ago. Cranach, whose pornographic, sinful nudes epitomise what this show calls the "strange beauty" of German art, embodied those tensions. He was best man at Martin Luther's wedding even while he painted sensual Salomes.

But this exhibition fails to communicate the excitement of Cranach and his contemporaries to such an extent that it had me puzzling over its tragic, joyless carcass. Instead of the jaw-dropping gathering of weird nudes, grisly crucifixions and witches' revels that I expected to see, or the masterpieces I looked forward to from collections in Berlin, Munich and Basel, there's not much going on here except academic onanism and curatorial self-abuse.

The first room is all about the history of "taste" as expressed in the National Gallery's collecting policy in the 19th century. I did a double take but then thought, it's OK, they're setting up the argument before moving on to the masterpieces.

In the second room there's more of the same. And in the third room – at last – comes a little flash of excitement as we are shown a small but powerful selection of prints and drawings. Albrecht Dürer's drawing of a child's head for his great print Melencolia I is shown next to the print itself. A sketch of a man's freshly severed head by Hans Burgkmair is equally gripping. Now for the top-notch painting loans from Germany – but there are none. Instead we are presented with old friends from the National Gallery like Holbein's Ambassadors. Apart from a nice choice of British-owned drawings, and one painting from the Royal Collection, everything here is from the National Gallery itself. Usually you can see The Ambassadors for free, but here is a chance to pay £7. Tempted?

Trying to excite people about the German Renaissance without borrowing any art from Germany is absurd. But popularising the art of the past does not seem to be the aim of this exhibition. Instead it wants to raise questions like a university director of critical studies. The last room does not even have art, just questions written in big letters. I can ask those myself, thanks. Just give me something new to look at.

Rating: 2/5

ArtNational GalleryJonathan Jones
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Who's the vandal: Ai Weiwei or the man who smashed his Han urn?

An attack on the Chinese artist's installation in Miami has been condemned as an act of vandalism. Why is smashing art only acceptable if an acclaimed global artist does it?

A "protest" at a Miami art museum raises some questions about what exactly art is, now.

On Sunday, a man called Maximo Caminero has smashed an artwork by Ai Weiwei, one of the most famous artists of this century and a hero to many for his defiance of the Chinese state. Cue appalled face. But this is not such a simple story. Caminero's proclaimed motive – that the Perez Museum in Miami should be showing local, not global, art – is pretty daft (I didn't know they had Ukip in Florida), but he has accidentally punched a massive hole in the logic of contemporary art.

For the "vase" that was smashed is actually a Han dynasty urn that Ai Weiwei "appropriated" for his own art by painting on it. The Han era in China was contemporary with the Roman Empire in the west. In other words, this is a major antiquity made by a Chinese artisan roughly 2,000 years ago. But that's not why the urn is valued at $1m or why its destruction is world news.

No – it's because it was part of an installation by Ai Weiwei. It is the Ai Weiwei artwork, not the Han dynasty object, that is being mourned. Perhaps it is not really an antique at all. If it's a fake, that makes the entire installation more likable. If it's not a fake, then surely Ai Weiwei, and not Caminero, is the vandal who ruined a whole bunch of antiquities by painting them whimsical colours?

I certainly would love to believe that Ai Weiwei only uses fake Han urns. I mean, why would he actually wreck real ones?

In the exhibition Ai Weiwei: According to What?, at which the vase was smashed, an array of repainted "Han urns" are shown in front of a sequence of black-and-white photographs of the artist smashing one.

This artwork is called Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn and for me it is Ai Weiwei's most provocative gesture. I feel highly provoked. It shows the artist letting go of an elegant object made with intelligence, imagination and love more than 2,000 years ago and letting it smash to bits on the ground.

Much as I wish there were, there is no apparent doubt about the authenticity of the Han artefacts Ai Weiwei uses in his art. He bought a batch of them in the 1990s and started by painting them before creating his photographed performance Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn in 1995.

What does his attack on Han art mean? I must admit I'm confused. I want to see it as a devastating satire on the modern world's alienation from the past. Ever since the Chinese Revolution began in the early 20th century, political and economic ruptures have cut off China in particular from its ancient culture. Is Ai Weiwei parodying that? Or is he mocking western art-lovers who think all Chinese art is ancient (as they may have, back in 1995)?

Ai Weiwei certainly does capture the industrial world's disconnection from making, our loss of crafts and even of basic respect for them. But he also embodies these cynical attitudes as he smashes that lovely old vase. He seems to invite further violence to art – even his own.

For this is not the first time an Ai Weiwei appropriation of a Han urn has been smashed. In 2012, art collector Uli Sigg was filmed smashing an urn in emulation of Ai Weiwei – except the one he smashed was one of Ai Weiwei's most famous works, Coca Cola Urn. Since Uli Sigg owned it, he was free to do so.

So – smashing art is interesting if an acclaimed global artist does it, and even if an art collector does it. But the guy who walks into a museum and smashes it is a vandal.

Could it be that smashing masterpieces is never interesting? That this illegal attack on art exposes the shallowness of the high end of contemporary art, where it's cool to smash Han antiquities or doodle on Goya prints?

Ai Weiwei is courageous and eloquent but this incident and his response – for he has condemned the vandal – make me wonder about the rules of art right now. The reasons for condemning one destructive act and celebrating another don't seem clear. Suddenly, the world's most respected artist looks a bit conceptually fragile.

Ai WeiweiArtPaintingUnited StatesJonathan Jones
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The 10 most apocalyptic floods in art

From photographs of Hurricane Katrina to Monet's impressionistic wasteland, these deluged landscapes capture the destructive power of nature

Leonardo da Vinci – The Deluge Drawings (c1517-8)

In his late years Leonardo, disillusioned with the failure of Renaissance Italy to support either his art or his science, and fascinated by the power of water as a natural force to be exploited and feared, concentrated all his most pessimistic forebodings in a series of drawings of "deluges". In them, armies, cities, horses, trees and even mountains are helpless before the unleashed fury of storm and flood.

Michael Appleton – Hurricane Katrina (2005)

The horror of Hurricane Katrina is captured in a picture by photojournalist Michael Appleton of blazing buildings in abandoned New Orleans. The fires reflected in sinister water and the camera angle give this photograph a terrifying cinematic allure.

Master of the St Elizabeth Panels – The St Elizabeth's Day Flood 1421 (c1490-1500)

In the late medieval Netherlands an artist whose name is forgotten recorded the devastating 1421 flood that for generations to come reminded the Dutch of what could happen if they dropped their guard. The detailed landscapes in these panels are waterlogged quagmires in which settlements are isolated. Yet people struggle to get through the misery, scrambling to safety with what little they can carry as the sea breaks through.

Michelangelo – The Flood (1508-12)

Michelangelo has great compassion for the doomed people who cannot escape the waters sweeping away their world. This depiction of the flood from the book of Genesis was one of the first scenes he painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Instead of concentrating on God's chosen survivor Noah, this radical artist imagines the anguish of all who are doomed to drown.

Francis Danby – The Deluge (c1840)

Danby's rock'n roll deluge is a perverse masterpiece of Romantic art. As the last pitiful victims of the biblical flood cling to whatever vanishing handholds they can find, a red sun sets on a black world. The painter takes dark relish in the horror of it all, luring the mind into a waterworld of blues, blacks and greens. Eerie lightning exposes Noah's ark in a distant flash of cold silver, while a golden angel weeps.

Claude Monet – Flood Waters (1896)

Monet is not usually thought of as an apocalyptic artist. But in this flooded landscape, everything is lifeless and abandoned. The trees are ghosts and no people intrude on the spectral, post-human beauty.

Ed van Wijk – Survivors of the 1953 Flood (1953)

The flooding of the North Sea's coasts on 31 January 1953 killed 1,836 people in the Netherlands and 326 people in Britain. This photograph captures the shock and suffering of those who survived this inundation so soon after Europe's near-destruction by war.

Hokusai – The Great Wave (from Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji) (c1829-32)

This is not exactly a picture of a flood – but it is certainly apocalyptic. Hokusai's fishermen quail in their fragile boats beneath a mighty onrush of water. While it probably depicts a massive swell, it is hard not to see the Great Wave as a tsunami heading towards land, yet its destructive force is profoundly beautiful.

Thomas Cole – The Subsiding of the Waters of the Deluge 1829

As the waters of the biblical flood start to ebb away in this American romantic artist's uneasy vision, nothing is as it was. A horribly glorious sunlight reveals smashed trees scattered on the bedrock of a depopulated earth. Everything has been purified. The world is new again – an empty, shining blank slate.

Max Ernst – Europe after the Rain (1940-2)

The continent of Europe has been reduced by some unimaginable storm to a rotting landscape of mud and rocks in this great modern history painting. The deluge that has destroyed everything recognisable in Ernst's world is of course not natural, but human. This is a metaphor for Nazism and the second world war.

ArtPaintingPhotographyJonathan Jones
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Sex, sex, sex, burglars and George Clooney – the week in art

We've had a complete history of nudes in art and the 10 sexiest artworks ever. Plus Clooney's on a Monuments Men-fuelled news frenzy – all in your favourite weekly art dispatch

Exhibition of the week

Strange Beauty: Masters of the German Renaissance
The art of the German Renaissance is full of witches, werewolves and supermodels. Lucas Cranach the Elder painted nudes with a lanky, bony beauty – the Renaissance's answer to heroin chic. He makes Venus look truly sinful. Cranach was Martin Luther's best man, and responsible for burning several supposed witches – so his infatuation with dangerous desire has a dark side. He and his contemporaries mix medieval folklore with the new classical ideas coming out of Italy to create bizarrely compelling masterpieces. This ought to be fascinating.
• National Gallery, London WC2N, from 19 February until 11 May.

Other exhibitions this week

Germany Divided
German art exploded back into life during the cold war – and as this exhibition shows, Georg Baselitz and his generation admired and revived the printmaking tradition that goes back to the Renaissance.
• British Museum, London WC1B, until 31 August.

Joana Vasconcelos
This provocative Portuguese installationist is let loose in Manchester after recently staging a controversial show at no less a venue than Versailles: she was banned from exhibiting a candelabra made of tampons as part of a feminist homage to Marie Antoinette.
• Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester M2, from 15 February until 1 June.

Helen Frankenthaler and JMW Turner
The abstract expressionist movement to which Frankenthaler belonged admired Britain's great – and abstract? – Romantic artist. This is an encounter between two mighty painters.
• Turner Contemporary, Margate CT9, until 11 May.

Court and Craft
An exquisite handbag made in medieval Iraq is the centrepiece of the Courtauld's first ever exhibition of Islamic art.
• Courtauld Gallery, London WC2R, from 20 February until 18 May.

Masterpiece of the week

Albrecht Dürer – Rhinoceros (1515)
Albrecht Durer's woodcut of a rare and novel beast is a magnificent product of the curious, questioning Renaissance mind.
• British Museum, London WC1B.

Image of the weekWhat we learned this week

What the 10 sexiest artworks of all time are

The naked truth about the history of nudes in art

That Richard Rogers's flatpack homes for homeless people look exactly like a Monopoly hotel

That George Clooney's on an art rampage … first he wanted the Parthenon marbles to return to Greece – and now he's called for the Mona Lisa to be returned to Italy

That Francis Bacon's portrait of the guy who burgled his house has sold for 10 times what it went for 14 years ago

That Richard Hamilton's mega Tate Modern exhibition is a true 20th-century variety show

That roving street photographers from Afghanistan have managed to capture a whole nation

An A-Z of incredible hulks

Why Russia should ban Michelangelo and Caravaggio's gay 'propaganda'

And finally ...

Follow us on Twitter

Share your art about your holidays to offset the grim weather outside

PaintingInstallationDrawingExhibitionsArtGeorge ClooneyJonathan Jones
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The top 10 sexiest works of art ever

From Egon Schiele to Titian and Robert Mapplethorpe, these artists have celebrated erotic pleasure in unique and thought-provoking ways

Egon Schiele – Woman with Black Stockings
1913

There is no sexier artist than Egon Schiele. The reason his nude and semi-nude portrayals of his models and lovers are so beguiling is quite simple – they have a filthy quality. Schiele, who got arrested for what he was up to, depicts women with not only lust and adoration but a dirty-minded frankness that transports his art from the merely beautiful to the wildly erotic.

Pablo Picasso – La Douleur
1902 or 1903

Picasso was obsessed with women and sex, and this passion could not be entirely fulfilled by the modernist masterpieces into which he poured so much love and sometimes loathing. From his youth to his old age – when he created a series of pornographic prints featuring the Renaissance master Raphael – he made erotica as well as his more public art. This early work records the day-to-day life of the young artist and brothel hound.

Hokusai – The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife
1814

In Hokusai's masterpiece of the Japanese erotic art genre known as Shunga, a woman diving for pearls is being pleaured by two octopuses. The larger of them enfolds her pale, naked body in its tentacles as it performs cunnilingus, its subtle attentions releasing rapture.

Meret Oppenheim – Object
1936

The furry cup – ever since it was created this has been the most famous erotic artwork of the 20th century. While her male colleagues in the Surrealist movement were exploring neuroses and paranoias, Oppenheim got straight to the point and created a sculpture that is pure sex. Her celebration of cunnilingus is today a universal icon of pleasure.

Correggio – Jupiter and Io
About 1530

A naked woman is embraced by a blue mist in Correggio's fantastically explicit rendering of Greek myth. Apparently the god Jupiter was the original Velvet Fog. In the ancient story he takes this form to evade his wife's suspicions. Correggio, however, turns it into an erotic fantasy and literally imagines what it would look like if a mist enveloped a nude. She melts in delight as the cloud caresses her.

Robert Mapplethorpe – Jim, Sausolito
1977

What makes great erotic art different from plain porn? It is the passion and investment of the artist – the subjective heart of the image. In his photographs of the gay sado-masochist scene of the 1970s Mapplethorpe goes beyond titillation or reportage to create intimate portraits of a shared fantasy world. Here is an artist showing us what he finds beautiful.

Helmut Newton – Office Love
1977

The art of Helmut Newton is at once heightened and theatrical, sophisticated and witty – and yet, at its heart, profoundly serious. For Newton is not kidding about sex. He wants his photographs to arouse, and they do, because he so boldly explores his longings. But what makes his art so sexy is his obvious belief that sex is the most important thing in the world, a matter of life and death.

Antonio Canova – Psyche Revived by Cupid's Kiss
1787-93

The power of love revives the dead in this great artistic hymn to desire. Canova is perhaps the only artist who has ever made marble sexy. His statues are tremendously erotic, as he carves cold stone into smooth tender images of naked flesh. Here, both Cupid and Psyche are nudes of intense beauty and their embrace is proof that love conquers all.

Tracey Emin – Those Who Suffer Love
2009

In her most explicit video, Tracey Emin creates an animated sequence of her drawings of a woman masturbating. It is a dirty homage to Egon Schiele, and a work of art that manages to be both poetic, as an image of loneliness, and exciting, as an image of pleasure.

Titian – Danae
1544

A woman prepares to make love to a God in this heavenly painting. Jupiter comes to Danae in the form of a shower of gold – a joke with an edge. The model may have been a courtesan and the lover of the cardinal who commissioned this painting, so money was changing hands in their love life. Yet there's something overwhelmingly spiritual about this scene. Titian here raises sex into a religion.

ArtEgon SchielePablo PicassoTracey EminTitianSculptureInstallationPaintingDrawingPhotographyJonathan Jones
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Why Russia should ban Michelangelo and Caravaggio's gay 'propaganda'

If it follows anti-gay laws shadowing the Sochi Winter Olympics, surely Russia should censor masterpieces in its finest museum

Russia's assault on the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people has not, after all, dominated the Sochi Winter Olympics – not yet anyway. Despite all the advance comment, once the sports start it seems that the world television audience switches off its brain and enjoys the skiing.

Perhaps art is a better battleground than sport. Because, if it observes the terms of its ban on the "propaganda of non-traditional sexual relationships" to the young, Russia should censor a couple of the greatest artistic masterpieces in its finest museum, where they can be seen by susceptible people of all ages.

Caravaggio's painting The Lute Player is a jewel of the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg. It also happens to be one of his most luxuriantly homoerotic works. A youth plays the lute, its music being a symbol of love in Caravaggio's age: "If music be the food of love, play on …"

But what kind of love? Not the kind that's OK with the Russian Duma. Caravaggio lingers on the youth's big eyes, on the pretty scarf that ties his curly hair and on the loose shirt that reveals his throat. The painter delights in a sensual feast of fruits and flowers, red lips and long, smooth fingers.

This is no Romeo pining for his Juliet – it is a boy offering his love to Caravaggio. Even the art critic Andrew Graham-Dixon, who has written books about Michelangelo and Caravaggio, must see how gay this picture is. And if he can see this, so can Vladimir Putin. What, then, is the Hermitage to do about this gay propaganda?

If that weren't enough, the Hermitage also owns Michelangelo's sculpture Crouching Boy. This case is more complex, not least because its authorship has been questioned. When I saw it in the Hermitage it transfixed me as a work of devastating power.

If Caravaggio reveals his sexuality in images, Michelangelo proclaimed his in poems that surely fit the Russian state's definition of "propaganda" for gay lifestyles. Although Michelangelo insisted he was celibate, he never denied where his passions lay.

That makes him a hero by the standards of most modern developed nations, but in Russia it would logically make him vulnerable to censorship. And what better "propaganda" can there be for homosexuality than the art and writings of two of the world's greatest geniuses?

Michelangelo Merisi da CaravaggioMichelangeloPaintingArtGay rightsWinter OlympicsWinter Olympics 2014SculptureJonathan Jones
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Why censor this Michelangelo spoof? It is a perfect advert for disbelief | Jonathan Jones

There is nothing offensive about this atheist student poster. In fact, Michelangelo was the first to parody his Sistine masterpiece

This witty poster has reportedly been censored at a British university for being "religiously offensive". Student union officials took down the advert for the Atheist Society at London South Bank University in what has to be one of the daftest and most anti-intellectual acts of censorship since the Catholic church told Galileo to point his telescope the other way round in case he discovered something that offended flat-Earthers.

The most famous panel of Michelangelo's early 16th-century ceiling fresco in the Sistine Chapel has been altered so that, instead of a bearded humanoid god, there is an octopus made of spaghetti with two great meatballs, swirled in draperies and flanked by angels in the heavens. The Photoshopping is well done: the spaghetti monster fits right into Michelangelo's grand cosmic vision. It is a perfect ad – not for cars or perfume, but for disbelief.

The image was created by The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, a "pastafarian" ministry founded to satirise American religious fundamentalism. It's a welcome bit of humour in a debate that has become intense and fundamental among atheists as well as believers: how much more likeable this visual joke is than the "atheist bus" campaign that launched here a few years ago. But what, in the Spaghetti Monster's name, is offensive about it?

The artist has not done anything to God. All that has been altered here is a painting by Michelangelo. OK, for some of us Michelangelo is as godlike as artists get – but that does not make his images sacred. To be offended by this travesty you would have to believe that when Michelangelo painted God's face he was recording a direct miraculous vision of the creator, and that his painting is therefore a miraculously given direct image of God and must be revered as such.

No one has ever claimed any such thing – not even in the Renaissance when it was painted. On the contrary, Michelangelo's Sistine ceiling is a revolutionary humanist masterpiece. It may portray divine creation but what it actually celebrates is human creativity. Everyone who has ever visited the Sistine chapel stands with head bent back and is filled with awe, not at the majesty of God but the energy and daring of art.

The first person to parody Michelangelo's portrait of God was Michelangelo himself. While he was working in the Sistine chapel, standing (not lying, as Charlton Heston inaccurately did in The Agony and the Ecstasy) on a wooden platform suspended just under the ceiling, he wrote a poem lamenting his lot. He complains about the paint dripping down on his upturned face and beard, about having to twist his body monstrously as he reaches up all day and night. By the manuscript poem, he added a cartoon. A naked artist stretches up to paint God on the ceiling – but God is a crude graffito, an absurd caricature with long spiky hair. Not a million miles from the Spaghetti Monster, in fact.

In other words, Michelangelo did not think there was anything inherently sacred about his image: it was a picture of God made by a man; it was not a holy relic. Later in his life, he was attacked for this. Michelangelo, complained pious critics, put art before God.

This shows how far back religion would have to turn the clock to erode modern secular freedom. In the 1500s, European society was already abandoning the religious worship of images. Art for art's sake turned God into an image, nothing more. Protestants smashed paintings and statues that they judged "idolatrous".

All the censors of this picture have achieved is to publicise a highly entertaining piece of atheist art. And to draw attention to the terrible lack of humility before God that is shown by the most famous Christian painting in the world.

AtheismMichelangeloArtCensorshipHigher educationPastaReligionJonathan Jones
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Michelangelo: The Lego Movie's architectural superhero

Lego Michelangelo is a refreshing addition to the animated posse who unites to save the world in The Lego Movie – perhaps Lego should create Renaissance building kits too

The Lego Movie has lots of superheroes in it. This comic toy fest features Lego figurines of Batman, Superman – and also someone less predictable.

One of the Master Builders – an assembly of figurines who gather to save the world – is none other than Lego Michelangelo, the Florentine artist, architect and poet who created David.

Introducing him, a bearded wizard called Vitruvius – another cultural allusion, this time to the ancient Roman architectural writer Vitruvius – pronounces his name with a short i to distinguish him from the other Michelangelo in the room, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle.

I love the idea of a Lego Michelangelo (the artist); I hope they release this as a real mini-figure as well as a screen character.

They might also consider creating kits of some of his buildings. Michelangelo is most famous for his sculptures and paintings, but my favourite of all his works is his great architectural masterpiece, the Laurentian Library in Florence. Its bizarre interior is expressive and disconcerting. Long before Zaha Hadid, this Renaissance radical was breaking all the rules.

Those rules were set, as it happens, by the very Vitruvius who has also been resurrected by Lego. In his hugely influential Latin treatise on building, this ancient writer set out the principles of classical design that were revived in Renaissance Italy: columns and pediments, harmony and proportion.

When Michelangelo took up architecture after he had already painted and chiselled his way into history, he turned these rules inside out. The Laurentian Library is a dark travesty of the classical orders. Windows are blank dead ends. Columns seem to float impossibly in midair. Massive stone scrolls weigh down the walls. Instead of soothing harmony, he uses – or abuses – the classical elements to create an oppressive, morbid atmosphere. With its use of dark stone completing the sinister effect, the entrance hall of this eerie library is a stage set for a Hamlet, an architecture of tragedy.

Lego is today the world's architecture school, teaching kids the elements of design and construction in deliriously enjoyable ways. Yet its beautiful architecture kits are mostly of modern buildings – from the Empire State to Fallingwater.

It would be wonderful to see the architecture of Michelangelo, or maybe one of his contemporaries like Palladio or Bramante in the mix of Lego kits.

Failing that, I'll settle for the mini-figure and see what Lego Michelangelo can invent.

ArchitectureLegoToysJonathan Jones
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