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 wood 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 through 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 shortly 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 menace of local weather change, in addition to making an attempt to incorporate extra girls in management and LGBTQ+ Catholics in congregations. He typically fell quick. 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 outcome was a profound aesthetics of humility, which demonstrated a give attention to 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 12 months, Pope Francis stated that artists ought to goal 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 12 months celebrating the Jubilee of Artists and the World of Tradition, whereby Francis outlined a selected imaginative and prescient relating to the need of aesthetics, a name to justice that included not simply bread, however roses. That the Church has been an unbelievable patron of the humanities — see Fra Angelico, Giotto di Bondone, Raphael, and Caravaggio for an abridged record — is past apparent. That Francis so typically presided over mass in St. Peter’s Basilica beneath Michelangelo’s huge dome speaks to the deceased pope’s rivalry 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 selected 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 recognized 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 footwear. This was the pope whose first choice was to refuse the plush papal residences in favor of the Vatican’s guesthouse, simply as attending the staid funeral of a bishop moderately than that of a pontiff was one in all his final. These decisions embodied the central rigidity within the Roman Catholic Church, heightened in an unconventional papacy resembling 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 standard Washing of the ft throughout a go to to a middle for disabled folks as a part of Holy Thursday (Maundy Thursday) as a part of the Holy Week on April 17, 2014 in Rome. (picture by ALBERTO PIZZOLI/AFP through Getty Photos)
The aesthetics of humility have been additionally a characteristic of Pope Francis’ ministry, particularly in its dissemination of images. This may be seen within the images of Francis performing the Holy Thursday custom of the washing of the ft in imitation of Christ over the past week of his life. Final 12 months, Francis carried out the ritual for inmates on the Rebibbia girls’s jail outdoors 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 moderately 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 completely different from earlier papacies, however particularly that of Benedict, who most popular to chop a extra mysterious and distant determine. By shifting 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 stated 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 way of Latin America. Baptized within the negotiations and culpabilities of Argentina’s Soiled Struggle, Francis was keenly conscious of the hazards of authoritarianism, evidenced by all the pieces from his persevering with condemnation of the genocide in Gaza to his preaching in opposition to the rising tide of fascism in the USA. (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 essentially 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 rigidity 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 way of artwork. Francis’s aesthetic philosophy was so highly effective exactly as a result of it understood that artwork isn’t mere artifice, however moderately 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 model, 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 battle — lined collectively within the courtyard in entrance of Catholicism’s mom church. They’re represented huddled collectively in a ship, the varied 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, targeted on poverty, depicting the dove of the Holy Spirit pulling a blanket over a sleeping man, which the artist defined was meant to remind folks of a “spiritual duty to the poor.” The victims of battle 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, nevertheless, essentially the most salient picture could 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 arms clasped, his gaze targeted 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 just apprehended in our encounters with one another. Pope Francis isn’t considered a mystic, precisely — this scientifically skilled 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 commonly 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.
