9. Gian Lorenzo Bernini

The Ecstasy of St Theresa surely rivals Tracy Emin's bed

As an Italian artist, sculptor and architect, we salute you, Bernini, a true master of your trade.

As Wikipedia reminds us, you managed to capture the sheer drama of a narrative, in marble, of all things, and leave the one looking on near breathless in awe. You make it worthwhile even going into a Church in Italy to look at your art, even though you, too, were seduced by the fairymongerers in the Vatican, most likely as a small boy, knowing them.

But, oh, how much greater, Bernini, would your art have been had you been alive today! Perhaps you would have steered clear of the incessant Biblical references and themes from the lives of the Saints, those mythical heroes from antiquity?!

Perhaps, instead, you would pioneer new and innovative modern art today, in which you would challenge the prevailing orthodoxies of religion by carving a urinal out of marble and leaving it in the art gallery, or better a Church, laughing at the shock and confusion that you had caused by your subversive atheistic leanings!

Perhaps, Bernini, instead of carving The Ecstasy of St Theresa, if you had not been brainwashed by the sinister Vatican mafia, you would have challenged your admirers by carving out a marble bed with condoms, underpants, and maybe a porno mag among dirty marble sheets and made the public think of more important earthly matters like getting laid and being generally dirty.

Perhaps, you would have carved a shark and placed it, not in formaldehyde, but instead, in marble! Or a marble tent with the names of all the people you've shagged carved on the inside!

Oh, Bernini! If only your genius were here today, it would have been improved ten thousand times, because you would have stuck to atheistic, temporal affairs, rather than the yearning of the sky fairy land and those ridiculous spiritual flights of fancy that you documented in stone!

Why could not artists who appear to have been so much more gifted in yesteryear than they are this year, perhaps even more evolved than modern artists, have kept to the same themes that modern artists enjoy, the ones that challenge us and yet confirm us in our unbelief and especially the ones that detract from religion or mock it gratuitously?

Think, Gian Lorenzo, of the modern themes that you could have got your marble cutting teeth into; themes such as self-indulgence, depravity, despair, existential angst, documenting the wholesale collapse of Western civilisation, total confusion, themes of moral decay, urban graffiti and the violence that marked 20th century Europe. Perhaps, Bernini, were you alive today you would challenge the Church, who were so often your wicked paymasters, and produce the recurrent and increasingly more common desecration of religious imagery and iconography, especially concerning Christ and the Virgin Mary, that we have today, in marble?

Oh! Think of how much better art would be today if Gian Lorenzo were still here, doing the same things that modern artists do...only in marble!