The most representative photo From Pope Franciscus – then only Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Argentina – catches him on a simple, latent wooden sofa on the metro in his hometown. An unconscious crowd of commuters and students stands and shifts around the future Society of Jesus In which he was dedicated, stared at the photographer with penetrating brown eyes and perhaps the little hint of a smile. Here was the image of a priest who preached in Barrios, who quickly baptized the media the ‘people’s pole’. This photo would instruct the surgical aesthetics of Francis, the Pope of many scoops: the first Jesuit, the first Pontiff from America, and the first to accept the name Francis-the 13th-century Italian saint who preached a gospel of simplicity, humility and love.
The papacy of Francis was controversial under conservatives for changing the tenor (and sometimes teaching) the Roman Catholic Church, which shifts the focus according to inequality and injustice, the existential threat of climate change, and try to include more women in leadership and LGBTQ+ Catholics in congregations. He often fell short. But his papacy embodied St. Francis’s statement in his monastic rules: “Let’s not love in word or in tongue, but in act and in truth.” The result was an in -depth aesthetics of humility” Who showed a focus on the Christian social gospel, on the Magnificat with his call to glorify the “modest and meek” and the beation with their implication that “blessed are the poor”.
Earlier this year, Pope Franciscus said that artists should strive to be “preservators of the saving” – that is, the doctrine of Christ about power and grace of the sermon on the mountain – and that “art is not luxury, but a necessity of the Spirit. It is not an escape, but a responsibility, an invitation to action, a call, a call.” This was during a homily this year for the Anniversary of artists and the cultural worldIn which Francis outlined a certain vision with regard to the need for aesthetics, a call for justice with not only bread, but also roses. It is more than clear that the church has been an incredible patron of art – see Fra Angelico, Giotto di Bondone, Raphael and Caravaggio – more than clear. That Francis so often foreses Mass in the Basilica of St. Peter under the huge umbrella of Michelangelo speaks to the claim of the deceased Pope that art a “Universal language that spreads beauty and unites people, which contributes to the introduction of harmony into the world. “But if it is true that art is a universal language, then it can speak in a certain accent, which was certainly the case with Francis’s papacy, especially in contrast to the only one before.
From the very beginning of Pope Francis’s term of office, after the shocking resignation of his predecessor, the conservative German Pope Benedictus XVI, his tailor and aesthetic choices, had theological implications. While Benedict had reduced the visual rhetoric of the papacy to one Tridentine’s traditionalism -He was known for gold-threaded robes and extensive velvet robes, red slippers, a crozier in-popey Tiara-Francis, a golden stones, was celebrated for his simple white cassock and his sliding black shoes. This was the Pope whose first decision was to refuse the lush papal apartments in favor of the Vatican’s guesthouse, just as attending the steadfast funeral of a bishop instead of that of a Pontiff was one of his last. Those choices embodied the central tension in the Roman Catholic Church, reinforced in an unconventional papacy as his: that the pope must be on the beautiful throne of St. Peter – but St. Peter himself was just a modest fisherman.
The aesthetics of humility was also a characteristic of the ministry of Pope Francis, especially in the spread of images. This can be seen on the photos of Francis that the Holy Thursday tradition of washing the feet in imitation of Christ During the last week of his life. Last year, Francis performed the ritual for prisoners in the Rebibbia Women’s Prison outside of Rome. On one photo the older pope kneels for a convicted person, the rolled up gray training pants from the woman in contrast to the pope’s white hat. In 2022 he chose not to perform that solemn ritual in the same way under the umbrella organization of Michelangelo, but rather in the prison of Civitavecchia, where he begged for a meeting of male and female prisoners. Only three years after his election, Francis carried out the Maundy on Thursday ritual for asylum seekers and refugees, including Coptic Christians and Muslims.
Such images were considerably different from previous papacies, but especially those of Benedict, who preferred to cut a more mysterious and distant figure. By moving the papacy from the Basilica and in prisons and refugee camps, Francis hoped to embody the principle that “we priests should be the first to do not exploit,” as he said at the Maundy Thursday Mass 2022-a non-substitute remark about the historical outlook of the church with a number of crimes and breeding, including cultivities and breeding. Francis did indeed develop his way of thinking, not only in the seminar, but in the slums of Buenos Aires; He was influenced by – although not necessarily attach to – left -wing liberation theology, which then rises through Latin -America. Baptized in the negotiations and learning resources of the dirty war of Argentina, Francis was well aware of the dangers of authoritarianism, proven by everything from his Continuous conviction of the genocide in Gaza to his Preaching against the growing tide of fascism in the United States. (Not without any irony, his last private audience was with Vice President JD Vance of the United States).
Although Francis made it clear that he was not a Marxist, especially for conservative critics, he also positioned himself as demonstrably the most steadfast anti-capitalist Western leader. Although he would undoubtedly not agree with much of what the Brazilian Archbishop Hèlder Câmara taughtThere was a clear Franciscan feeling of wry irony in the observation of that liberation theologian that “when I feed the poor, they call me a saint, but when I ask why the poor are hungry, they call me a communist.” That is again a central tension of Catholicism – this church rich in liturgy, ceremony, ritual and of course real wealth. Where Low -church Protestants often shuns (and understandable) decoration and ornament as pride and idolatical, the Catholic Church has defined itself by art. Francis’s aesthetic philosophy was so powerful, precisely because it understood that art is not merely artifice, but rather an intrinsically human right; That art, while preaching at the Jubilee mass, is central to the salvations.
And so his Vatican embraced a certain proletariat art, a continuation of Franciscuss aesthetics of humility in not only personal style, but the museums and galleries of Rome itself. Take, for example, the Canadian artist Timothy Schmalz’s 2019 ‘Angels Unwares’ of 2019,’ The first new sculpture that was unveiled in St. Peter’s since Berninis in the 17th century, which was devoted to commemorating the 105th world day of migrants and refugees. Schmalz, celebrated for his piece ‘Homeless Jesus’ (2013), shows a line of refugees, both spatially and temporarily – a Cherokee on the trail of tears, a Jew that fled Nazism, escaped a pole from Stalinism, a Syrian threatened by the civil war – combined in the court side of the Catholicism. They are displayed in a boat in a boat, the various collection of 140 that stands in front of the columns on St. Peters’s Colonnade in a gesture to the holiness that is present at all people, regardless of religion. Schmalz, as interviewed by Hakim Bishara in a 2019 Hyperallergic Article, explained that “the idea of the image is to show that we have all come from another place.” Just like “angels unexpected” Spoken displacement, ‘shelter’, another Schmalz piece from 2022, focused on poverty, who depicted the pigeon of the Holy Spirit who pulled a blanket about a sleeping man who stated the artist to remind people of a ‘spiritual duty towards the poor’. The victims of war were commemorated in the same way by art unveiled by Francis, the most recently in a birth scene from December designed by Palestinian artists Johny Andonia, Faten Nastas Mitwasi and Peter Khano who presented the baby Christus Swaddled on a Keffiyeh.
Returning to visual representations of the Pope, the most striking image can, however, be unveiled long before Francis was born, in Cigoli’s 1599 Baroque masterpiece ‘imitation of Christ’, Can be seen in the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia. The namesake of the Pope, St. Francis of Assisi – he who helped the poor and embraced the animals, who preached a gospel of simplicity and love – is delighted in prayer, his hands clamped, his gaze aimed at something in the outside. The mountains of the Umbrian countryside where it was raised are depicted in an alien, blurry blue Sfumato. This mystic, who fed the poor and dressed the naked, whose canticles praised the brother Zon and the sister. Extatic, understood that the meeting of the absolute is only held in our meetings. Pope Francis is rarely considered a mystic, precisely – this scientifically trained Jesuit who worked as a chemicist – but still, as he has observed astute in a 2013 interview with La Republica, a ‘religion without mystics is [just] A philosophy. “A false dichotomy is often made between the contemplations of the mystic and the action of the mission. But what the experience of a St. Francis, of a Pope Francis, is an example of that if we search for infinite, we will find it in embracing our brothers, our sisters.
