The Ascension, Workshop of the Pénicaud family, late 16th c, 📸 by @jessie_adell pic.twitter.com/4dlAh09hAn
— ArtButMakeItSports (@ArtButSports) August 26, 2024
Don’t look now, but the New Orleans Saints were featured on the trendy “Art But Make It Sports” page after their preseason loss to the Tennessee Titans. And to make it worse, it’s because of an impressive play from Louisiana native Tyjae Spears.
More to the point, it’s recognizing an outstanding photo of Spears’ hurdle over a wall of Saints defenders captured by Titans team photographer Jessie Adell Rogers.
The account, managed by New York Knicks fan and part-time art historian LJ Rader, has gone viral on social media — closing in on 500,000 Twitter followers while regularly earning thousands of impressions online. And it’s a great bit, drawing comparisons in color and composition between the work modern sports photographers do and what can be found in masterpieces at museums around the world.
Unfortunately, the Saints wound up on the wrong side of this one. Spears, of course, hoped the Saints would draft him last year. Rader likened this photo to “The Ascension,” a French painting created by an unknown artist in the late Sixteenth Century. The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, which exhibited the piece from 2011 to 2012, describes it as such:
The subject may represent the Ascension in the spirit, an appearance of Christ to his disciples during his supernatural life after the Resurrection. Christ is represented nude, clad only in a loincloth and a flowing mantle, and showing his wounds. The twelve apostles, who manifest various expressions of astonishment and rapture, are distinguished only by their age. They bear no attributes. In the background one sees a town and a mountain ridge.
The figure of Christ seems to have been inspired by that in a painting, The Doubting Thomas, executed in 1551, by Léonard Limosin for the church of Saint-Pierre-du-Queyroix in Limoges. Today this is in the museum at Limoges and was restored in 1963. On the other hand, Léonard Limosin may have used for his painting a figure of Christ designed by Jean Pénicaud II for his workshop.
So there’s some art history for you. It’s a shame the Saints passed on Spears in last year’s draft, but good on him for making a great play. And big respect to Rogers for snapping such a great photograph. Hopefully the next time the black and gold are featured by this social media trend it’s because of a great moment they’ve created.
