Eye Magazine

The parental warning that momentarily stoped visitors about to enter the central eight-sided domed hall of Maastricht’s Bonnefanten Museum may have come to late. Climbing the stairs to this focus of the building, one saw its contents from afar – through the open doors shimmered the rosy fleshtones of a wide selection of genitals, brightly photographed against a pure white background. The eight walls of the solemn hall were covered floor to domed ceiling with enlarged close-ups of crotches, mail and female, young and old. The hall has the accoustics of a cathedral, and visitors lowered their voices while wandering around, smiling. There was no tagline anywhere in this room – it was not needed. This must have been the apex of Oliviero Toscani’s ambitions, this chapel of the United Colors of Benetton. Here – we were in Holland after all – it was not so much a provocation as a celebration of unity in diversity. Rejoice, ye people of good will!

An exhibition of advertising posters in a serious museum of art may at first have seemed incongruous, but it had the merit of bringing out an often overlooked – or, if acknowledged, ridiculed – aspect of Toscani’s campaigns for Benetton: their religious zeal and their art-historical references. It has been said before that the famous poster with the dying aids victim resembled a classic Deposition or Lamentation (with the father as mourning disciple and the two women the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene). Other posters look like votive paintings or scenes from a Saint’s life. If Toscani maintains that ‘images are the new reality’, then this reality has deep roots in two millennia of Christian iconography.