Don’t look now, but the New Orleans Saints were featured on the trending site “Art But Make It Sports” following their preseason loss to the Tennessee Titans. And to make matters worse, it was thanks to an impressive game from Louisiana native Tyjae Spears.
More specifically, it is recognition of an outstanding photo of Spears’ hurdle over a wall of Saints defenders, taken 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 – it has nearly 500,000 followers on Twitter and regularly garners thousands of impressions online. And it’s a great piece, drawing comparisons in color and composition between the work of modern sports photographers and what can be found in masterpieces in museums around the world.
Unfortunately, the Saints lost out. Spears had obviously hoped the Saints would draft him last year. Rader compared this photo to “The Ascension,” a French painting painted in the late 16th century by an unknown artist. The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, which exhibited the work from 2011 to 2012, describes it as follows:
The motif may represent the Ascension in the Spirit, an appearance of Christ to his disciples during his supernatural life after the resurrection. Christ is depicted naked, wearing only a loincloth and a flowing cloak, showing his wounds. The twelve apostles, who show various expressions of astonishment and rapture, are distinguished only by their age. They bear no attributes. In the background is a city and a mountain ridge.
The figure of Christ seems to have been inspired by a painting that Léonard Limosin created in 1551 for the church of Saint-Pierre-du-Queyroix in Limoges: Doubting Thomas. This painting is now in the Limoges Museum and was restored in 1963. On the other hand, Léonard Limosin may have used for his painting a figure of Christ that Jean Pénicaud II had designed for his workshop.
So that was a little 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 props to Rogers for that great photo. Hopefully the next time the black and gold show up in this social media trend, it’s a great moment they created.
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This article originally appeared on Saints Wire: Tyjae Spears, Saints in viral trend ‘Art But Make It Sports’
