Caravaggio: The Crowning With Thorns

Speaking of suffering (see previous post), this Caravaggio masterpiece was the best thing we saw when we visited the Houston MFA last month. It's pretty large, maybe 4 feet by 5 feet. Dynamic and energetic. In Protestant Christianity, you don't see much body imagery. But in Catholicism, the body is everything, especially depictions of Christ suffering. Let's do a quick survey: In Islam you see no human depictions at all. Judaism, not much. In Zen and some other forms of Buddhism very few human forms. But Hinduism has plenty of humans, demons, and gods, as does Tibetan Buddhism and the Buddhism of SE Asia, thus the closest corollaries to Catholicism among the other great religions. The theology of the body. Protestant Christians represent the theology of the Word.