The Jigsaw Man II

Added on 30 December 2008

I continue with Jigsaw Therapy, Prozac at the kitchen table, an attempt to repair the shattered shards of my id, left smashed and strewn by the years of parenthood and the moral bankruptcy of the crime writing psyche.

Currently working - if you can call it work - on Michelangelo’s The Last Judgement. A Christmas present. I had strangely been on the point of buying it anyway, as I’m thinking of trying to incorporate some of it into the cover of The Final Cut, much in the same was as Da Vinci’s Last Supper was used for The Last Fish Supper. Use of this painting from the Vatican wall will point to The Final Cut being the last judgement of Barney Thomson, as I try to invest a piece of genuine pulp fiction with Biblical significance. Again.

The Last Supper lends itself much more to a book cover, being a far simpler painting. Well, simple apart from all those messages that Da Vinci was sending personally to Dan Brown, but basically it’s thirteen blokes sitting around a table eating deep fried haggis and chips. The Last Judgement on the other hand features an enormous cast of characters, angels and demons, and the poor souls in-between being cast down or summonsed up. Too complex to effectively reduced to being part of a book cover. So I will need to draw out one feature of it, one particular character or perhaps a small scene of a soul being wrestled by demons.

To Jesus’ left, down by his foot, is St Bartholomew. Bartholomew, in his day, was skinned alive and either beheaded or crucified upside down. No one seems very sure. Maybe he just passed away peacefully at the age of 105, during the afternoon session of the first day of the fourth Test. Michelangelo went for the skinned alive route, and depicts Bartholomew holding his own flayed skin in one hand, while proffering Jesus the kinfe with his other. Oddly the knife looks like a giant condom. A full condom.

‘Here Lord, take my sperm. I have no more need of it.’

There must be something going on. The Michelangelo Code starring Tom Hanks will reveal all.