Benetton has got into hot water again with an image purporting to show the Pope kissing the leader of Cairo's grand mosque.
Copied from The Guardian. A Link to the full article is here. and an extract is here....
Benetton's adverts are actually a homage to a renowned Berlin wall graffiti painting of Communist leaders Erich Honecker and Leonid Brezhnev kissing. Everyone finds it funny to see former leaders of the defunct Soviet bloc snogging, it seems, but when contemporary figures from the western world are similarly mocked the cannoli hit the fan.
Why is the Vatican so displeased, and why did Benetton so readily surrender? The image of the pope is one of the greatest triumphs of marketing in history. A church that is led by a venerable celibate might seem to have an in-built selling-point problem. How can popes, who necessarily take the throne of St Peter as old and often ailing men, be made to seem charismatic and glamorous in a world that values youth and physical vigour?
The papacy tackled this problem five centuries ago by calling in some of the greatest image-makers in world history. Today's advertising gurus have nothing on Raphael and Titian. One of the most influential images of power in the history of the world hangs quietly today in London's National Gallery: Raphael's portrait of Pope Julius II created a new paradigm for papal portraiture by showing age as dignity, inner wisdom and sad knowledge. The power of this portrait was emulated and refined by Titian, then by Velázquez. Popes were reimagined in the Renaissance and baroque eras as men whose age and restraint conferred great natural authority.
The interesting thing is how the image of the Pope is instantly recognisable (and perhaps the Islamic cleric's image is similarly well known to Muslim viewers world wide), and also that western viewers, certainly, will immediately make the connection between the image and the seemingly endless revelations about sexual abuse and misdemeanours of various kinds throughout the Catholic church - and the hypocrisy which often goes with the death about these issues.
But even though Benetton removed the advert very quickly, they have won the attention they were seeking - as they have in various previous provocative adverts in the past. It is a bit like children behaving badly - it's a good way of getting attention, and negative attention is not much less desirable than positive.
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