Attempted Bloggery: Vatican

Showing posts with label Vatican. Show all posts

Saturday, October 25, 2025

Bluesky Labels My Sexually Suggestive Adult Content

Bluesky's website describes itself as "Social media as it should be." I'm all in favor of that. In fact, I use Bluesky to publicize every single new post on this very blog.

Imagine my surprise then when I found one of my posts on the platform had been dinged Wednesday by Bluesky's moderator, possibly a bot, as "Adult Content." I had been promoting my recent post on illustrator Edward Sorel's depiction of God creating autumn and its source material from the Italian Renaissance. What then was my offense?

The label applied to my supposedly adult content by @moderation.bsky.app was "Sexually Suggestive." They added, not very helpfully, "Does not include nudity." I take that to mean nudity alone is not deemed to be sexually provocative.

Here then is my "sexually suggestive" "adult content," revealed:

I immediately submitted an appeal, of course, but the label hasn't been removed as of this posting. The censored image, for the sake of Bluesky employees and others who may have never seen it before, is Michelangelo's Creation of Adam (c. 1512) from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. It's right there in the Vatican at the end of the museum tour. You can't miss it unless you don't look up. I borrowed the image from Wikipedia.

Note: You can follow me, docnad, on Bluesky here. Who knows?— I might even post more sexually suggestive adult content.

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Tuesday, August 6, 2019

Vatican City 2019: St. Peter's Basilica

After we saw the Vatican Museums, our tour continued on to St. Peter's Basilica.

St. Peter's Basilica
The façade is by Carlo Maderno

The Apostolic Palace with the Papal Apartments seen from St. Peter's Square

St. Peter's Square with Egyptian obelisk

Colonnades designed by Bernini

The Holy Door

Bernini's altarpiece seen from Maderno's nave

What looks like a painting is actually a mosaic.

Altar with Bernini's baldacchino

The dome

Michelangelo Buonarroti
The Pietà

St. Peter's Square from the Basilica

Castel Sant'Angelo

Castel Sant'Angelo from Pont Sant'Angelo

Rome: The Tiber

The Piazza Navona with the Fountain of the Four Rivers and Sant'Agnese in Agone

The Piazza Navona with Sant'Agnese in Agone

Fountain of Neptune, Piazza Navona

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Saturday, August 3, 2019

Blog Post No. 3000: The Vatican Museums 2019

My mother-in-law told us that when she visited the Sistine Chapel in the 1950s she could lie face-up on the floor to take in Michelangelo's magnificent ceiling. Today there are forty-thousand daily visitors each of whom hopes to commune with the famous ceiling. Even if the chapel weren't crowded at all hours of the day, I'm certain that lying down on the ground to claim a comfortable vantage point would not be permitted.

The summer crowds are a concern that might best be dealt with by reserving tickets in advance. If one does this through a tour, one can enter earlier than the general public. We used the tour group Viator, or Italy Wonders. Unfortunately, our tour skipped so many essential parts of the Vatican Museums that I can't recommend the group, but we did get to see Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel and Raphael's School of Athens which is certainly what most visitors want to see.

Our tour, and dozens of others, met across the street from this entrance before the Vatican Museums opened. While waiting we bought ourselves some overpriced coffee served black.

Vatican City is not large. The magnificent dome of St. Peter's Basilica overlooks the museum grounds where tours regrouped.

The Belvedere Courtyard with a taunting view of some other areas of the Vatican Museums I assumed we were going to see.

The Vatican Museums' long halls are done extremely well:

Too nice to walk on:

The ceiling is painted to look like relief. Still, the cracks indicate it's got to be a conservator's nightmare.

Tapestry designed by Raphael depicting the resurrection of Christ:

Raphael
The Resurrection of Christ (large detail)

Tapestry designed by Raphael:

The Gallery of Maps:

The world turned upside-down: Sicily, with the south oriented to the top.

The far end of the Gallery of Maps:

Exposure to the elements:

Up above:

Down below:

Roman mosaic

Fine woodwork:

Gianfrancesco Penni or Giulio Romano
The Donation of Constantine
Sala di Costantino

Raphael
Ceiling of the Room of Heliodorus

Raphael
The Expulsion of Heliodorus from the Temple, 1511–12

Raphael
The Mass at Bolsena, 1512

Raphael
The Meeting of Leo the Great and Attila

Raphael
The School of Athens (large detail)

Raphael
The School of Athens (detail with Euclid or Archimedes)

Border details:

Border detail

Tiles underfoot:

Raphael
Disputation of the Holy Sacrament

A gift of the Musée Rodin, 1959:

Auguste Rodin
The Thinker, c. 1880, cast 1956

Pierre Matisse donated preparatory designs created by his father Henri Matisse for the Chapel of the Rosary in Vence.

This is a Pope by Francis Bacon, but is it a screaming Pope?

Francis Bacon
Study for Velázquez Pope II, 1961

Photography is forbidden in the Sistine Chapel not, as we were told, for religious reasons but because the Vatican sold the photo rights at the time of the restoration. Instead I give you these amazing views from the Sistine Chapel Virtual Tour.

Michelangelo Buonarroti
The Sistine Chapel Ceiling

Michelangelo Buonarroti
The Last Judgment

There should have been a lot more. No tour (except ours apparently) would be complete without stopping in the Museo Pio-Clementino. There in the Octagonal Court one can see the Apollo Belvedere, a masterpiece of Classical Antiquity greatly admired a few generations ago and proudly displayed on the Vatican Museum's ever-improving website:

Roman copy after Leochares
Apollo Belvedere

http://www.museivaticani.va/content/museivaticani/en/collezioni/musei/museo-pio-clementino/Cortile-Ottagono/apollo-del-belvedere.html

And, of course, the Laocoön Group, a Hellenistic masterwork which I think speaks more to our own time:

The Laocoön Group

http://www.museivaticani.va/content/museivaticani/en/collezioni/musei/museo-pio-clementino/Cortile-Ottagono/laocoonte.html#&gid=1&pid=1

Another essential stop would have to be the Hall of the Muses to see the Belvedere Torso, a large sculptural fragment which had a profound influence on Michelangelo.