An Italian museum has defied Pope Benedict by refusing to remove a statue of a crucified green frog clutching a beer mug and an egg.

The Vatican had condemned the modern art sculpture as blasphemous.

The board of the Museion museum in the northern city of Bolzano voted it was a work of art, however.

'Zuerst die Fuesse' (Feet First), condemned as 'blasphemy' by the Vatican, has gone on display in an Italian museum

The board decreed it would stay in place for the remainder of an exhibition.

The wooden sculpture by the late German artist Martin Kippenberger depicts a frog about 1 metre 30 cm (4 feet) high nailed to brown cross and holding a beer mug in one outstretched hand and an egg in another.

Called "Zuerst die Fuesse," (Feet First), it wears a green loin cloth and is nailed through the hands and the feet in the manner of Jesus Christ. Its green tongue hangs out of its mouth.

Kippenberger's works have been shown at the Tate Modern and the Saatchi Gallery in London and at the Venice Biennale, and retrospectives are planned in Los Angeles and New York.

Museum officials in the northern bi-lingual Alto Adige region near the Austrian border said the artist, who died in 1997, considered it a self-portrait illustrating human angst.

Pope Benedict, who is German himself and was recently on holiday not far from Bolzano, obviously did not agree.

The Vatican wrote a letter of support in the pope's name to Franz Pahl, president of the regional government who opposed the sculpture. Pahl released parts of the letter, which said the work "wounds the religious sentiments of so many people who see in the cross the symbol of God's love".

Pahl, whose province is heavily Catholic, was so outraged by the sculpture of the pop-eyed amphibian that he went on a hunger strike to demand its removal and had to be taken to hospital during the summer.

"Surely this is not a work of art but a blashphemy and a disgusting piece of trash that upsets many people," Pahl said.

"This decision to keep the statue there is is totally unacceptable. It is a grave offence to our Catholic population," he said.

Art experts defended the work.

"Art must always be free and the artist should not have any restrictions on freedom of expression," Claudio Strinati, a superindendent for Rome's state museums, told an Italian newspaper today.