Probably the most consultant {photograph} of Pope Francis — then simply Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Argentina — captures him sitting on a easy, slatted picket bench on the subway in his native metropolis. An oblivious crowd of commuters and college students stands and shifts across the future pontiff, who wears the straightforward black shirt and Roman collar of the Society of Jesus during which he was ordained, staring on the photographer with piercing brown eyes and possibly the slight trace of a smile. Right here was the picture of a priest who preached in barrios, whom the media rapidly christened the “People’s Pope.” This {photograph} would foreshadow the operative aesthetics of Francis, the pope of many firsts: The primary Jesuit, the primary pontiff from the Americas, and the primary to take the identify Francis — the Thirteenth-century Italian saint who preached a gospel of simplicity, humility, and love.
Francis’s papacy was controversial amongst conservatives for altering the tenor (and generally instructing) of the Roman Catholic Church, shifting its focus to inequity and injustice, the existential risk of local weather change, in addition to trying to incorporate extra ladies in management and LGBTQ+ Catholics in congregations. He typically fell brief. However his papacy embodied St. Francis’s declaration in his monastic guidelines, “let us not love in word or in tongue, but in deed and in truth.” The consequence was a profound aesthetics of humility, which demonstrated a deal with the Christian social gospel, upon the Magnificat with its name to glorify the “humble and the meek” and the Beatitudes with their imploration that “blessed are the poor.”
Earlier this yr, Pope Francis mentioned that artists ought to intention to be “custodians of the beatitudes” — that’s, Christ’s teachings about energy and mercy from the Sermon on the Mount — and that “Art is not a luxury, but a necessity of the spirit. It is not an escape, but a responsibility, an invitation to action, a call, a cry.” This was throughout a homily this yr celebrating the Jubilee of Artists and the World of Tradition, whereby Francis outlined a specific imaginative and prescient concerning the need of aesthetics, a name to justice that included not simply bread, however roses. That the Church has been an unimaginable patron of the humanities — see Fra Angelico, Giotto di Bondone, Raphael, and Caravaggio for an abridged listing — is past apparent. That Francis so typically presided over mass in St. Peter’s Basilica beneath Michelangelo’s large dome speaks to the deceased pope’s competition that artwork is a “universal language that spreads beauty and unites peoples, contributing to bringing harmony into the world.” But when it’s true that artwork is a common language, then it may possibly converse in a specific accent, which was actually the case with Francis’s papacy, notably in distinction to the one earlier than it.
From the very starting of Pope Francis’s tenure, following the stunning resignation of his predecessor, the conservative German Pope Benedict XVI, his sartorial and aesthetic decisions had theological implications. Whereas Benedict had returned the visible rhetoric of the papacy to a Tridentine traditionalism — he was identified for gold-threaded vestments and elaborate velvet robes, purple slippers, a gem-encrusted crozier, and the golden papal tiara — Francis was celebrated for his easy white cassock and his scuffed black sneakers. This was the pope whose first determination was to refuse the luxurious papal residences in favor of the Vatican’s guesthouse, simply as attending the staid funeral of a bishop fairly than that of a pontiff was one among his final. These decisions embodied the central stress within the Roman Catholic Church, heightened in an unconventional papacy comparable to his: that the Pope should sit on the resplendent throne of St. Peter — however St. Peter himself was however a humble fisherman.
Pope Francis (L) kisses the foot of a person as he performs the normal Washing of the toes throughout a go to to a middle for disabled individuals as a part of Holy Thursday (Maundy Thursday) as a part of the Holy Week on April 17, 2014 in Rome. (photograph by ALBERTO PIZZOLI/AFP through Getty Photos)
The aesthetics of humility have been additionally a function of Pope Francis’ ministry, particularly in its dissemination of images. This may be seen within the pictures of Francis performing the Holy Thursday custom of the washing of the toes in imitation of Christ over the last week of his life. Final yr, Francis carried out the ritual for inmates on the Rebibbia ladies’s jail exterior of Rome. In a single {photograph}, the aged pope kneels earlier than a convict, the rolled-up grey sweatpants of the girl in distinction to the white cassock of the pope. In 2022, he equally opted to not carry out that solemn ritual beneath Michelangelo’s dome, however fairly on the Civitavecchia Jail, the place he supplicated earlier than an assemblage of female and male prisoners. Solely three years after his election, Francis carried out the Maundy Thursday ritual for asylum seekers and refugees, together with Coptic Christians and Muslims.
Such imagery was markedly totally different from earlier papacies, however particularly that of Benedict, who most well-liked to chop a extra mysterious and distant determine. By transferring the papacy out of the basilica and into prisons and refugee camps, Francis hoped to embody the precept that “We priests should be the first to serve others, not exploit,” as he mentioned on the 2022 Maundy Thursday Mass — a not-so-subtle touch upon the Church’s historic complicity with any variety of crimes and evils, together with the sexual exploitation of kids. Certainly, Francis developed his mind-set not simply within the seminary, however within the slums of Buenos Aires; he was influenced by — although not essentially adherent to — the leftist liberation theology then ascendant by means of Latin America. Baptized within the negotiations and culpabilities of Argentina’s Soiled Conflict, Francis was keenly conscious of the risks of authoritarianism, evidenced by every part from his persevering with condemnation of the genocide in Gaza to his preaching in opposition to the rising tide of fascism in america. (Not with out some irony, his final non-public viewers was with United States Vice President J.D. Vance).
Whereas Francis made clear that he wasn’t a Marxist, notably to conservative critics, he additionally positioned himself as arguably probably the most steadfastly anti-capitalist Western chief. Although he doubtlessly would have disagreed with a lot of what the Brazilian Archbishop Hèlder Câmara taught, there was a distinctly Franciscan sense of wry irony in that liberation theologian’s statement 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’s, once more, a central stress of Catholicism — this Church wealthy in liturgy, ceremony, ritual, and naturally precise riches. The place Low Church Protestants typically (and understandably) eschewed ornament and decoration as prideful and idolatrous, the Catholic Church has outlined itself by means of artwork. Francis’s aesthetic philosophy was so highly effective exactly as a result of it understood that artwork isn’t mere artifice, however fairly an intrinsic human proper; that artwork, as he preached on the Jubilee Mass, is central to the beatitudes.
And so his Vatican embraced a sure proletariat artwork, a continuation of Francis’s aesthetics of humility in not simply private fashion, however the museums and galleries of Rome herself. For example, take Canadian artist Timothy Schmalz’s 2019 “Angels Unawares,” the primary new sculpture to be unveiled in St. Peter’s since Bernini’s within the seventeenth century, which was devoted in commemoration of the one hundred and fifth World Day of Migrants and Refugees. Schmalz, celebrated for his piece “Homeless Jesus” (2013), depicts a line of refugees each spatial and temporal — a Cherokee on the Path of Tears, a Jew fleeing Nazism, a Pole escaping Stalinism, a Syrian endangered by civil warfare — lined collectively within the courtyard in entrance of Catholicism’s mom church. They’re represented huddled collectively in a ship, the various assemblage of 140 standing in for the columns on St. Peters’s colonnade in a gesture in direction of the saintliness current in all people, no matter faith. Schmalz, as interviewed by Hakim Bishara in a 2019 Hyperallergic article, defined that the “idea of the sculpture is to show that we have all come from another place.” Simply as “Angels Unawares” addressed displacement, “Sheltering,” one other Schmalz piece from 2022, centered on poverty, depicting the dove of the Holy Spirit pulling a blanket over a sleeping man, which the artist defined was meant to remind individuals of a “spiritual duty to the poor.” The victims of warfare have been equally commemorated by artwork unveiled by Francis, most not too long ago in a nativity scene from December designed by Palestinian artists Johny Andonia, Faten Nastas Mitwasi, and Peter Khano that offered the toddler Christ swaddled upon a keffiyeh.
Cigoli’s “Imitation of Christ” (1599), depicting St. Francis of Assisi (through Wikimedia Commons)
Returning to visible representations of the pope, nonetheless, probably the most salient picture might have been unveiled lengthy earlier than Francis was born, in Cigoli’s 1599 baroque masterpiece “Imitation of Christ,” on view on the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia. The pope’s namesake, St. Francis of Assisi — he who helped the poor and embraced the animals, who preached a gospel of simplicity and love — is proven enraptured in prayer, his palms clasped, his gaze centered on one thing seen within the past. The mountains of the Umbrian countryside the place he was raised are depicted in an otherworldly, hazy blue sfumato. This mystic, who fed the poor and clothed the bare, whose canticles ecstatically praised the Brother Solar and the Sister Moon, understood that the encounter of the Absolute is simply apprehended in our encounters with one another. Pope Francis is never regarded as a mystic, precisely — this scientifically educated Jesuit who labored as a chemist — but, as he astutely noticed in a 2013 interview with La Republica, a “religion without mystics is [just] a philosophy.” A false dichotomy is usually made between the contemplations of the mystic and the motion of the mission. However what the expertise of a St. Francis, of a Pope Francis, exemplifies is that if we search the infinite, we’ll discover it in embracing our brothers, our sisters.
