Water into Wine into Q Ratings
When do visions of Jesus fall short or (heaven forbid!) get in the way of divinity?
That old adage that “cleanliness is next to godliness” might be behind it, implying that divinity is something doable like a yoga pose, available for humans to adopt or imitate if they choose. Real s-t -r-e-t-c-h-i-n-g might be completely optional as 19th century German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach proposes, however, arguing in The Essence of Christianity that we imagine God mostly in terms of ourselves, which nicely means that we already know much about him, and can probably anticipate the rest.
Well before Feuerbach’s ideas about such heavenly projections, Milton relies on a similarly flattering formula when he introduces Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost by telling us that Adam is tall and Eve shorter with wilder hair, but that both of them are “Godlike erect.” Height, hair, and verticality do for Milton’s poem what cleanliness does in these latter days, making holy the way we already present ourselves to others. What else about God do you really need to know?
Maybe I’m okay with the idea of a fastidious, tall god with extremely good posture, but a fashionable, shrewd, runway-ready one makes me squirm, as I did when I caught the deluxe reboot of The Devil Wears Prada. Into one of the movie’s overstuffed scenes is crammed Leonardo da Vinci’s famous painting of The Last Supper when (spoiler alert) Miranda Priestley reveals to Andy that she knows she’s been betrayed by an associate. Megan Garber mentions this strange “cameo” in a May 2026 essay for The Atlantic, but Garber mostly focuses on Jeff Bezos as the Prime Mover behind the scenes in a movie where technology and commerce have assumed leading roles. For Garber, da Vinci’s Last Supper merely decorates this craven new world, supplying a slightly faded screen on which Miranda can be remade, Garber claims, into “a figure worthy of redemption.”
Maybe Miranda believes that da Vinci uses Jesus the way she wants to use da Vinci, as a piece of fancy property that adds luster to a scene or expensive accessory signaling taste, class, and a higher calling. Metonymy is the literary trope which relies on props like these to create associations, summoning impressions through a round-up of related objects: lipstick signals love, tears stand for drama, and a halo points to holiness. Such props don’t contain deeper meanings or necessarily belong to them but are found close by, like the shell or husk which some invisible abstraction leaves behind as a residue. Think of the way a Hollywood Jesus enters a room in Milan through a painting so that Miranda Priestley can consecrate herself inside a sacred drama. The painting becomes an instrument only useful for a trick.
This kind of storytelling is sloppy, cheap, hyperbolic and lazy all at once, and it left me with an empty wrapper and sinking feeling watching da Vinci servicing a universe drained of soaring meanings with Jesus procured as a character witness. The parallel Miranda draws is clumsy and confusing because Jesus isn’t a figure of pity and Miranda is hardly a saint. Sympathizing with her because she knows about art is like feeling closer to God because a great artist painted him.
But there are other issues that bug me. In the same way that we don’t need to like every villain, we don’t need to understand what’s most sacred to us. Sandwiching The Last Supper between fashion shoots and using God to score points is pretty tacky. If the Devil wears Prada, does this movie simply want us to wonder what Jesus would wear?
Our current president frequently and flagrantly makes the same grabs for luster, divinity, and power, putting himself in proximity with the sacred as if it’s something that rubs off —as if the Essence of Christianity is a cologne or spray available for purchase in small, medium, and huge. Take the AI-image generated (and then quickly retracted) below, where a godlike Trump reaches out to bless/cure a bearded man, Trump’s patient a weird replica of the dying Christ, now awaiting a second-class coming. This is only the most coarse example of Trump’s string of metonymical tricks which includes renaming the Kennedy Center (tapped for combined whiffs of dynasty, artistry, and theatricality) and hinting at a perch on Mount Rushmore (monumentalizing himself in the process). Putting cage-fighters in front of the White House works the same way but in reverse, giving strong men the seal of authority and bloodshed the look of decorum. Halo to the Chief. But this has always been Trump’s story, changing optics by playing with real estate, adding prestige by updating his address — gilt by association.
I should be fair, though. If Trump hasn’t perfected this move, he didn’t invent it, either. During the Renaissance, painters often put their patrons in the same rooms with Jesus to mourn their savior, offer him presents, include themselves among the wise men or make themselves witnesses to godly suffering. Miranda undertakes the same time travel, although she points at a painting rather than puts herself inside it as a way to rebrand her power. But the town fathers stationed in the Ghent Altarpiece (see below) are sequestered at a distance, aware of what’s holy but reluctant to press their own designs too far. They gather at the edges rather than sneak into the center. This painting works more as a filtering device than flattering accessory, barricading an animal figure behind a squadron of angels as a way to block the sacred from earthly contamination. This is a painting about keeping the sacred at arms’ length, using an animal to refuse the analogy with the human. We aren’t essential to this story.
Nowadays, bumper stickers and marketing campaigns advertise kindness and greatness by using Jesus as life coach, therapist, or sneaker salesman. The sayings “God is Love” and “Just Do It” encourage forgiveness, consumption, athleticism, neighborliness, and gumption, as Bob Smietana reports in a 2002 article in the Religion News Service. There is a dark side to focusing on God’s human side, however. Exploring the rebranding of Jesus as both sentimental and calculating in a 2025 story for The Gospel Coalition called “Marketing Jesus: The Promise and Peril of ‘He Gets Us,’” Samuel James claims that we may be losing what’s most important about God in imagining him as a peer or friend always available to us. “Exactly how does Jesus ‘get’ us?” James wonders, concluding that “the Jesus of the ad campaign is simply a feeling to chase, rather than a person to listen to.”
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Clearly I’m not speaking to the choir when I propose that images of Jesus might be more accurate — responsible? effective? instructive? — when they challenge sentiment and rebuke our identifications and/or when they simply emphasize the bizarre features of a god who is also human, and therefore dying, bleeding, crying (or getting spanked) like a baby, losing his temper, falling asleep, momentarily forgetting about us. The two images I’ve pasted below — one of the baby Jesus comfortably napping on the cross, the other of his mother the Virgin Mary whupping her baby boy — experiment with the idea of Jesus as a radical hybrid, imagining his family, his fate, his agony and his feelings in ways that are completely unfamiliar as well as searing, shocking, off-putting and scary.
Jesus is represented in such images in ways that halt us in our tracks and make us wonder what we know, what we believe, what we prefer to focus on. Even da Vinci’s picture of Jesus in The Last Supper invites such reflections; as the Milan refrectory’s museum’s website indicates, unlike the luminous image of each of the apostles, Jesus’s image was left blurry and unfinished by da Vinci to make it harder for us to trust our eyes or rely on human techniques of knowing. The lamb in the Ghent Altarpiece presents a similar challenge. Unthreatening and mild, it has no words for us, no advice to share, and no way to embrace us. It stands apart, and the painting creates and protects this difference, forcing us instead to confront what’s unholy about humanity and inhuman about God.
Inside the 14th century Scrovegni Chapel in Padua is a cycle of frescos painted by Giotto, famous for their exhaustive cataloguing of sacred scenes, luminous couplings, and incredibly rich details. These gorgeous works are medieval and Renaissance all at once, lifting distinct individual experiences out of densely crowded conventional scenery, making sure that the earthly world is flooded with signs of heavenly grace. There is trust and suspicion; great joy in the smiles, gazes, twinkling eyes and sturdy grips of human flesh; and careful rendering of the weight of pain, the way death drags a body, and the geometry of a face scrambled by fear. Jesus is represented by Giotto as both with us and against us, a boy and baby and man as well as a superhuman alien desperate to rejoin his father in heaven as soon as his detour with us is over.
The exit ramp is clearly marked by Giotto in The Resurrection, where Jesus is already heading out the door. The Gospels record that he tells the mourning women gathered by his tomb and surprised by his reappearance “Noli me tangere” (don’t touch me), but Giotto makes the brush-off something rude and Jesus’s disdain palpable: this savior is eager to make a getaway. Perhaps he’s still slightly afraid of us, his body already turned and feet hustling him away from a world that judged him a criminal and sentenced him to death.
Giotto repeats the dynamic in The Ascension where Jesus, lifted by a cloud, is not merely s-t-r-e-t-c-h-i-n-g but actively clawing his way out of the top of the painting, his hands reaching past the frame. Again, he’s off the clock with his earthly assignment complete, and his wishes to be elsewhere are dramatically portrayed here. Da Vinci includes Jesus’s features only vaguely in The Last Supper, but Giotto makes it easy to read that Jesus wants to put many miles between him and us.
Maybe Jesus gets us, maybe not; he’d be better off in these two paintings by Giotto if he could simply do without us. Unlike the baby in our Christmas cards who helplessly needs us and requires little more than our collective cooing — or the heroic figure Miranda identifies with, aware of human frailty if aggrieved and still surprised by it — Giotto’s Jesus has other places to go. Divinity can shed off the human like a dead-end job or ugly outfit — something impossibly dated, itchy and poorly fitted, and entirely inappropriate for Jesus’s new position elsewhere.
