If you are a well-known and respectable artist like Leonardo Da Vinci, there is a chance that you paintings live forever. Famous paintings often inspire caricature artists to relate current issues with the paintings. But it is rather disheartening that these caricature artists use these beautiful paintings to mock public figures.
In February 2008, a famous Indonesian weekly magazine “Tempo” published its copy with the cover page of a painting inspired by Leonardo Da Vinci’s “The Last Supper”. The title of the image was entitled “Setelah Dia Pergi” (After He’s Gone). The image showed Suharto in white, sitting in the middle of the dining table, having a meal with his six children.
Source: www.indonesianmatters.com (Setelah Dia Pergi)
As the picture above possess similarities with “The Last Supper”, this issue created uproar among the Christians. The image is religiously and culturally sensitive. The Christians were angry because they felt that “Tempo” likened the infamous dictator, Suharto to Jesus Christ; and they felt like the magazine was insulting their God in some ways.
The editors of “Tempo” should understand when an unsuitable visual is used, misinterpretation will happen. (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006) Soon after the magazine was published, the chief editor of “Tempo”, Toriq Hadad apologized to the Christians saying that “Tempo” had no intention of upsetting the Christians, for they were just inspired by the composition of the famous painting.
As Weber stated, everyone should take responsibility for their own action for it the right and ethical thing to do. (Weber, 1995) “Tempo” made a right choice by taking responsibility to apologizing to the fellow Christian Devotees.
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Although none of the image published were intentional, document designers, especially caricature artists should take into consideration the purpose, context and audience when designing a document. (Putnis & Petelin, 1996) The most important thing to consider is the cultural context as we would not like offending any of our audiences.
ABC News, 2008, Indonesian weekly apologies over Last Supper Suharto cover, viewed 18th November 2009, available <http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/02/06/2156269.htm>.
Kress, G & Leeuwen, V 2006, Reading Images: visual communication,
O’Mahony, D 2007, What would Jesus do?, viewed 18th November 2009, available
<http://tinyplanetblog.com/?p=258>
Weber, J H 1995, ’Ethics in scientific and technical communication’, WISENET Journal 38, viewed
18th November 2009, available <http://www.jeanweber.com/newsite/?page_id=22>
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