Yemen, Fighting for Change
A post on the New York Times’ Lens blog noted that the image “has the mood of a Renaissance painting” - which, of course, is true. And that’s exactly one of the problems here. Jim Johnson already noted that the image in fact does not just reference Renaissance paintings in general. It assimilates Christian iconography (which was produced before and after the Renaissance as well): The Pietà, “depicting the Virgin Mary cradling the dead body of Jesus” (I’m including just a few examples in this post). If you have followed the news over the past decade even just tangentially, you might realize that using a visual language that could not be more Christian to depict an event in a Muslim country might pose a problem.
