A Better God

Huw Williams | 14:16, Saturday 09 February 2013 | Turin, Italy

Kitty and I stopped in one of our favourite coffee bars the other day on the way home from our walk. I say 'our favourite' because I love the coffee and Kitty loves the fuss she gets from the staff and other customers.

There was a new customer sitting at the next table, he wasn't a regular – I think I would have noticed him before. No sooner had we settled down than he was over, talking excitedly. I tried to explain that my Italian wasn't really up to a conversation of that complexity (or velocity) to which his his response was fairly typical; he acknowledged my problem and then continued to speak just as before. But from what I could understand, this distinguished and yet slightly bohemian-looking gentleman was a sculptor. And I could believe it – his long grey hair was tied back in a ponytail of the fashion only normally seen on men half his age or less, and his large, long-fingered hands looked as though they had seen many a hard day's work and yet which moved with such grace, such poetry when he spoke. Much like some conductors I know.

Studying Kitty's face, he explained to me (I think) that it was extremely difficult to sculpt the features of a baby's head and face accurately. If I understood him correctly (and this is a big if), a life-form sculptor takes years to master the art of shaping the adult head, learning the proportions and relative distances and positions of eyes to top of head, to top of ears and bottom of ears, to mouth and so on. For the developing skull of the baby, these typical distances and proportions are different and constantly changing for their first two years.  Thus to learn to sculpt life-form infants, the artist would almost need to relearn his or her art altogether. I felt like I was starring in an art-house film of my own imagination, hanging out in an Italian coffee bar, talking (kind of) art and sculpture…

For someone who knows next to nothing about sculpture, I found this free coffee house lesson fascinating. (Only yesterday we found ourselves looking at the Medieval art collection in the Palazzo Madama, and there among them was a centuries-old sculpted Madonna col Bambino, the child with an eerily, spooky and alarmingly adult-shaped head – was this a stylistic decision or a technical deficiency?) It would seem that it is only as we grow older that we become more uniform and predictable.

As I write this my mind anticipates our Bible study in Daniel chapter 3 this evening. Nebuchadnezzar gives orders to "satraps, prefects, governors, advisers, treasurers, judges, magistrates and all the other provincial officials" to bow down to his idol, and with a certain and ominous predictability, the "satraps, prefects, governors, advisers, treasurers, judges, magistrates and all the other provincial officials" duly bow down. The gods of any age have an ability to demand such predictable results from those whose hearts are set on self-preservation and self-promotion. But for three people at least in Ancient Babylon, there was good reason not to bow the knee to Nebuchadnezzar's ego-god. It wasn't youth, nor was it an obstinate rebellious streak, but it was the conviction that they had a better reason not to blindly bow to the gods of human invention – even if it meant at the cost of comfort or life in this world itself – to put it simply, they had a better God.

"Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego replied to the king, 'O Nebuchadnezzar, we do not need to defend ourselves before you in this matter. If we are thrown into the blazing furnace, the God we serve is able to save us from it, and he will rescue us from your hand, O king. But even if he does not, we want you to know, O king, that we will not serve your gods or worship the image of gold you have set up'. "