One of the Seven Man-Made Wonders of the World, it used to suffer about five lightning strikes a year. Now, though, it is increasingly more lightning prone and so with the climate worsening, major repairs and reinforcements are under way.

The work, spectacularly reported, with dizzying photographs, by the admirable online Atlas Obscura, includes the fitting of additional lightning-conducting spikes to the Redeemer's already very lightning-spiky horizontally outstretched arms (with their total span of 28 metres).

How Canberrans envy Rio its gigantic Jesus! If only one of Canberra's many, many tragically unemployed hilltops could be similarly decorated with a reinforced concrete Wonder to make the world go "Gosh!"

Perhaps I am growing up, because once upon a time when my atheism was more undergraduate and arrogant I would have scoffed audibly at Christians taking pains to defend Christian edifices against God's lightning.

More mature now, I find Rio's Jesus poignantly human and vulnerable and not a thing to be scoffed about. Out in all weathers, His increasing vulnerability to what a changing climate is flinging at Him seems, somehow, to echo the climate-battered plight of all of us, believers and non-believers alike.

In his scholarly book Science and Religion, historian John Hedley Brooke looks at how credulous clergy continued to resist the installation of Benjamin Franklin's new-fangled lightning conductor (invented in 1755) at St Mark's frequently lightning-demolished bell tower in Venice.

The clergy at first thought it presumptuous to try to use new-fangled science to control the artillery of Heaven. But then, when the tower was lightning-walloped in 1761 and again 1762, they thought again and installed a successfully tower-preserving conductor in 1766.

Perhaps the lessons learned and the theological hurdles somehow nimbly cleared at St Mark's in 1766 helped ensure Rio's Redeemer (erected between 1922-1931) has enjoyed some science-based lightning protection from the very first.

And still with Jesus, one of the most beguiling paintings in the National Gallery of Australia's vaunted Botticelli to Van Gogh exhibition (it is in its last days) is Domenico Ghirlandaio's The Virgin and Child.

Exquisite, in its limited way, it was painted in the late 15th century and, coincidentally, while that great painting and its famous, conventional subject are much on my mind, my smartphone has been bulging with new mother/new baby son images from today's Melbourne. A male rello has been using his smartphone to take and to send snaps of his partner tenderly juxtaposed with their new baby boy.

As always it strikes me (yes, I know I am in a way comparing apples and pomegranates, but please indulge me) that almost all our amateur family photographs of (new) Mother and (new) Child are somehow more engaging than almost every old masters' Madonnas and Child contrive to be.

I have just gone a'Googling to look at dozens of old masters' renditions of the great theme and find in so many of them an unrealistic aloofness between mother and child. Often the two figures seem like intellectual equals, or like an adult couple. Ghirlandaio's haloed and impossibly youthful pink-cheeked mother and her haloed pink-cheeked child (the child has by far the nattier halo) could be brother and sister.

The repertoire of expressions of love on the faces of the masters' painted Marys seems very limited. Mary is invariably emotionally composed, she is never perspiring and she is never, ever, kissing her baby. Meanwhile the love on the faces of true, photographed new mothers comes in a zillion varieties. Sometimes there are engaging glimpses of tender hysteria and adoring craziness.

Why is it so, this contrast between our snapped mothers and the old masters' painted ones?

Perhaps it is that the painters, painting in deeply religious times, needed to give Mary (after all, she is the Queen of Heaven) some divine dignity.

But quite why it was always thought too undignified for her to be kissing her baby is a little mystifying. So I am haunted by the (probably confused, immature) thought that my rello with his smartphone is capturing important things that escaped Domenico Ghirlandaio (1449-1494) with all his paints and brushes.