Crocodile in baptistery! What are the Church authorities thinking?

Architectural horrors... and where to find them - special edition #141 in Cremona

This week we bring you a 'special edition' of our column: not a real architectural horror, but a provocative self-described 'artistic' installation inside the Baptistery of San Giovanni Battista in Cremona, a masterpiece of Lombard Romanesque-Gothic architecture.

A large taxidermied crocodile has been hung on the vault of the Baptistery: it is Ego, a work by Maurizio Cattelan, dating back to 2019 and now re-proposed for the first edition of Cremona Contemporanea Art Week (26 May - 4 June).

What this horror (which at most poorly copies ideas taken elsewhere, in short a provocation for its own sake) has to do with a Baptistery, with the approval and sponsorship of the Curia of Cremona, is not known: we then learn that "Ego bears this title because, for Maurizio Cattelan, the crocodile is a sort of self-portrait, which he currently considers the closest to his personality. It is a work that stands in close relation to The Ninth Hour, the famous work with Pope John Paul II hit by the meteorite [...] "Crocodiles," Cattelan explained on the occasion of the 2019 exhibition, speaking with curator Michael Frahm, "have been protagonists of rituals, religions, magical beliefs, urban legends. They are creatures that both frighten and fascinate and have been deeply symbolic since the beginning of humanity'. And now, this strange creature can be seen by all, hanging inside the Baptistery of Cremona'.

In the spirit of the Gospel, we are reminded of our Lord's behaviour in the face of the desecration of the temple: "he began to drive out those who sold and bought in the temple; he overturned the tables of the moneychangers and the chairs of the dove sellers, and he did not allow things to be brought into the temple. And he taught them, saying: "Is it not written, 'My house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations? But you have made it a den of thieves!" (Mk 11:15-17).

After having watched with horror as the Diocese of Cremona transforms consecrated places intended for the celebration of the sacraments into exhibition spaces designed solely to satisfy the egotism of the media personality on duty, we repeat the question: do they deserve the eight per thousand? (the proportion of income tax that goes to the Church)

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