Robert Francis Prevost has been elected pope, taking the name Leo XIV. He becomes the spiritual leader of the world’s 1.3 billion Catholics, the first US pope, and the 267th holder of the office in succession to the first pope, St Peter.
Through his office, Leo becomes proprietor in trust of the great art and architectural treasures of Vatican City, and will be looked to as a moral authority, a global diplomat, and a voice for social justice in line with the teachings of the Catholic church and the pursuit of world peace. During the recent conclave that elected him, he was spoken of as a moderate and bridge-builder. His first words to the world from the balcony of St Peter’s Basilica were “Peace be with you.”
His actions as pope will be analysed for how they align with or differ from those of his predecessors, whether in political, social, doctrinal or liturgical matters. This will be done with particular reference to the impact of his three immediate predecessors: two largely conservative pontiffs—John Paul II (pope in 1978-2005) and Benedict XVI (2005-13)—and the more progressive Francis (2013-25), the first pope from the Americas and the first from the global south.
The examples of recent pontificates indicates that the new pope’s office gives him the stature, and the traditional foundations, to be an influential leader in multiple areas—from art history to climate change—of specific interest to cultural and visual arts organisations.
Art history
The new pope becomes head of one of the historic revealed religions, with ultimate charge not just of the Vatican Museums and Library, with their holdings covering two millennia of Christianity, but also the remainder of the built patrimony of the tiny Vatican City state at the heart of Rome.
As well as St Peter’s, a great Renaissance edifice and a building of special religious and architectural importance, the built patrimony includes the Sistine Chapel and its famous ensemble of late 15th- and early 16th-century frescoes; the jewel-like Niccoline Chapel adorned with frescoes by Fra Angelico; and the Raphael apartments, or stanze, in the Apostolic Palace of the Vatican, with the artist’s The School of Athens their crowning achievement. The Vatican also owns and maintains three papal basilicas in Rome that are outside the Vatican City but owned and run by the Holy See—Santa Maria Maggiore, San Giovanni in Laterano and San Paolo Fuori le Mura.
Under Benedict XVI and Francis, the Vatican Museums became involved as never before in exhibition loans to and from international museums, in a parallel development to the way that the Royal Collection Trust was opened up to the world of art history during the reign of the late Queen Elizabeth II.
Objects of devotion
Recent history suggests that the new pope will be in a position to influence the taste of the Catholic faithful in objects of devotion. During the early weeks of the global pandemic in 2020, Francis gave a powerful Easter speech, standing alone, in the rain and windswept darkness of St Peter’s Piazza. He prayed for deliverance from Covid-19 accompanied by a reproduction of his favourite devotional image: the Salus Populi Romani icon from the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore.
The Salus Populi Romani (the Salvation of the Roman People), as its name suggests, has a long connection to the city of Rome. Another of Francis’s favourite images, Johann Georg Melchior Schmidtner Mary Untier of Knots (around 1700), was a revelation to many Catholics, one that he popularised first in Argentina and then across the globe. The image’s subject spoke to Francis’s fundamentally practical, down to earth, nature; and his insistence that decisions had to be taken with thought, their difficulties “untied”.
Contemporary art
Four centuries on from the era of the great Renaissance art patron Popes—Julius II, Paul III, Paul V and Urban VIII—Pope Pius XII in 1949 launched a competition to build three new bronze doors to link the portico of the basilica to the nave, replacing old doors. Giazomo Manzù’s Door of Death was dedicated by Pope Paul VI in 1964.
Paul went on to set the Vatican on a concerted course of collecting contemporary art. His galleries of international modern and contemporary work opened in the Vatican Museums in 1975, featuring the acquisition of work by artists including Manzù, Henri Matisse, Marc Chagall, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí, Giorgio Morandi, Henry Moore and Graham Sutherland.
Benedict XVI, with the support of Antonio Paolucci, head of the Vatican Museums, and Archbishop Gianfranco Ravasi, the Vatican’s Minister of Culture, made a new connection to contemporary art which led to the Vatican having its first pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2013 and later its first at the Architectural Biennale in 2018.
On 21 November 2009 Benedict held a meeting in the Sistine Chapel with an international group of several hundred artists of many disciplines, including the artists Bill Viola, Anish Kapoor and Jannis Kounellis, and the architects Daniel Libeskind and Zaha Hadid. Benedict referred back to an equivalent meeting that Paul VI had held 45 years earlier in which Paul had told the 1964 group: “We need you. We need your collaboration in order to carry out our ministry, which consists, as you know, in preaching and rendering accessible and comprehensible to the minds and hearts of our people the things of the spirit.”
Viola denied to the New York Times that the Vatican “was trying to co-opt artists like him into helping improve its image. For centuries, he said, artists have struggled with ‘walking that fine line between creative freedom, between bending the rules; how far can you bend the rules before you break them?'”
In 2021 Pope Francis opened a contemporary art gallery in the Vatican library. With that gesture he followed up on remarks he had made in in the 2015 book La Mia Idea di Arte (my idea of art)—based on his conversations with the journalist Tiziana Lupi—when he said “The Vatican Museums must strive to be a place of beauty and welcome. They must embrace new forms of art. They must throw open their doors to people from around the world and serve as an instrument for dialogue between different cultures and religions, an instrument for peace.”
Francis attended the 2022 Venice Biennale, the first pontiff to visit the event, when he toured the Vatican pavilion and mentioned the late Catholic nun and activist Corita Kent—along with Frida Kahlo and Louise Bourgeois—as female artists whose works have “something important to teach us”.
Cultural restitution
Under Francis the papacy made powerfully symbolic gestures around artistic and cultural restitution. In November 2022, Francis ordered the Vatican Museums to return three Parthenon marble fragments to Greece, which had been held in their collections since the 19th century.
The three sculptural fragments had been held by the Gregoriano Profano Museum, home to the Holy See’s collections of antiquities. They include part of the head of the horse pulling Athena’s chariot in the frieze on the west side of the Parthenon, and elements of the heads of a boy and a bearded man.
This gesture was freighted with diplomatic symbolism as it followed Francis’s 2021 visit to Athens. There he had visited Ieronymos II, the Orthodox Christian archbishop of Athens and head of the Greek Orthodox Church, and made a night-time visit to the Parthenon.
“History makes its weight felt, and here, today,” Francis said. “I feel the need to ask anew for the forgiveness of God and of our brothers and sisters for the mistakes committed by many Catholics.”
This is a developing story.
