Robert Francis Prevost has been elected pope, taking the identify Leo XIV. He turns into the non secular chief of the world’s 1.3 billion Catholics, the primary US pope, the primary to be a member of the Augustinian Order of friars, and the 267th holder of the workplace in succession to St Peter.
The Chicago-born Prevost, who’s aged 69, has spent a lot of his life as a priest as an Augustinian missionary in Peru, and was head of the Augustinian order, as prior normal, in 2001-13. He was made Bishop of Chiclayo in Peru by his predecessor Pope Francis in 2014, and a cardinal in 2023. (In 2015 he grew to become a naturalised Peruvian citizen and holds twin citizenship.)
By way of his workplace, Leo XIV turns into proprietor in belief of the good artwork and architectural treasures of Vatican Metropolis, and might be appeared to as an ethical authority, a world diplomat, and a voice for social justice consistent with the teachings of the Catholic church and the pursuit of world peace.
In the course of the current conclave that elected him, he was spoken of as a average and bridge-builder, and is seen as a successor who will preserve Francis’s stand on migrants, the poor and social justice. He appeared visibly moved as he uttered his first phrases as pope to the world from the balcony of St Peter’s Basilica: “Peace be with you.”
Leo’s actions as pope might be analysed for the way they align with or differ from these of his predecessors, whether or not in political, social, doctrinal or liturgical issues. This might be completed with specific reference to the influence of his three fast predecessors: two largely conservative pontiffs—John Paul II (pope from 1978-2005) and Benedict XVI (2005-13)—and the extra progressive Francis (2013-25), the primary pope from the Americas and the primary from the International South.
Final yr, whereas nonetheless president of the Pontifical Fee for Latin America and Prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops, the then Cardinal Prevost clearly adopted Francis’s ground-breaking lead on the church’s obligation to handle local weather change.
Talking in relation to the 2015 encyclical Laudato Si’ (reward be to you)—wherein Francis had introduced local weather become Catholic doctrine—Prevost stated that it was time to maneuver “from phrases to motion” and to behave on the idea of the Catholic church’s social doctrine. In line with Vatican Information Prevost stated that “‘Dominion over nature’—the duty which God gave humanity—shouldn’t grow to be ‘tyrannical’. It should be a ‘relationship of reciprocity’ with the surroundings.”
The examples of current pontificates point out that the brand new pope’s workplace provides him the stature, and the standard foundations, to be an influential chief in a number of areas—from artwork historical past to local weather change—of particular curiosity to cultural and visible arts organisations.
Artwork historical past
The brand new pope turns into head of one of many historic revealed religions, with final cost not simply of the Vatican Museums and Library, with their holdings masking two millennia of Christianity, but additionally the rest of the constructed patrimony of the tiny Vatican Metropolis state on the coronary heart of Rome.
In addition to St Peter’s, a terrific Renaissance edifice and a constructing of particular non secular and architectural significance, the constructed patrimony contains the Sistine Chapel and its well-known ensemble of late Fifteenth- and early Sixteenth-century frescoes; the jewel-like Niccoline Chapel adorned with frescoes by Fra Angelico; and the Raphael flats, or stanze, within the Apostolic Palace of the Vatican, with the artist’s The Faculty of Athens their crowning achievement. The Vatican additionally owns and maintains three papal basilicas in Rome which are exterior the Vatican Metropolis however owned and run by the Holy See—Santa Maria Maggiore, San Giovanni in Laterano and San Paolo Fuori le Mura.
Underneath Benedict XVI and Francis, the Vatican Museums grew to become concerned as by no means earlier than in exhibition loans to and from worldwide museums, in a parallel improvement to the best way that the Royal Assortment Belief was opened as much as the world of artwork historical past in the course of the reign of the late Queen Elizabeth II. Each Benedict and Francis took a detailed curiosity within the Vatican Museums’ choices round conservation tasks and exhibition loans.
Arnold Nesselrath, former director of the Artwork Historical past departments of the Vatican Museums, instructed The Artwork Newspaper in 2023 that Benedict was carefully concerned in analysis into the restoration of the Vatican’s Pauline Chapel—dwelling to Michelangelo’s two final frescoes, The Conversion of Saul and The Crucifixion of St Peter (1542-49)—carried out by the Vatican specialists and accomplished in 2009. On one event, Nesselrath recollects, “Benedict spontaneously accepted my invitation to come back up on the scaffolding and to the touch Michelangelo’s Crucifixion of St Peter”. Benedict was likewise a major mover within the Vatican’s mortgage of Raphael’s Madonna di Foligno (1511), to hold subsequent to Raphael’s Sistine Madonna (1512) within the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister in Dresden, marking Benedict’s official go to to Germany—his dwelling nation—in September 2011.
A earlier Leo: Raphael’s Pope Leo X and cardinals Giulio de’ Medici and Luigi de Rossi (1518-20) Uffizi Gallery, Public area, by way of Wikimedia Commons
One among Francis’s closing interventions with the Vatican assortment was to be taken in his wheelchair into the nave of St Peter’s, days earlier than his loss of life, informally dressed, so that he would possibly thank the Vatican Museum conservators who had lately completed work on the restoration of the tombs to 2 nice papal champions of the constructing of St Peter’s: Guglielmo della Porta’s bronze and marble memorial to Paul III (1549-75) and Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s memorial to City VIII (1627-47).
Two earlier Leos—Popes Leo X and XI—had been members of the good Medici clan of artwork patrons. Giovanni di Lorenzo de’ Medici, Pope Leo X, a son of Lorenzo the Magnificent, was the topic of one of the vital intimate and surprising of papal portraits, Raphael’s Portrait of Pope Leo X and cardinals Giulio de’ Medici and Luigi de’ Rossi (1518-20), now within the assortment of Musei degli Uffizi.
Objects of devotion
Latest historical past means that the brand new pope might be ready to affect the style of the Catholic devoted in objects of devotion. In the course of the early weeks of the worldwide pandemic in 2020, Francis gave a strong Easter speech, standing alone, within the rain and windswept darkness of St Peter’s Piazza. He prayed for deliverance from Covid-19 accompanied by a copy of his favorite devotional picture: the Salus Populi Romani icon from the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore.
The Salus Populi Romani (the Salvation of the Roman Folks), as its identify suggests, has a protracted connection to town of Rome. One other of Francis’s favorite photographs, Johann Georg Melchior Schmidtner’s Mary, Untier of Knots (round 1700), was a revelation to many Catholics, one which he popularised first in Argentina after which throughout the globe. The picture’s topic spoke to Francis’s essentially sensible, down-to-earth nature; and his insistence that choices needed to be taken with thought, their difficulties “untied”.
Up to date artwork
4 centuries on from the period of the good Renaissance artwork patron Popes—Julius II, Paul III, Paul V and City VIII—Pope Pius XII in 1949 launched a contest to construct three new bronze doorways to hyperlink the portico of the basilica to the nave, changing previous picket doorways. The best of the brand new doorways, Giacomo Manzù’s Door of Dying, was devoted by Pope Paul VI in 1964.
Paul VI went on to set the Vatican on a concerted course of amassing up to date artwork. His galleries of worldwide Fashionable and up to date work opened within the Vatican Museums in 1973, that includes the acquisition of labor by artists together with Manzù, Henri Matisse, Marc Chagall, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí, Giorgio Morandi, Henry Moore and Graham Sutherland.
Benedict XVI, with the assist of Antonio Paolucci, the top of the Vatican Museums, and Archbishop Gianfranco Ravasi, the Vatican’s minister of tradition, made a brand new connection to up to date artwork, which led to the Vatican having its first pavilion on the Venice Biennale in 2013 and later its first on the Architectural Biennale in 2018.
On 21 November 2009 Benedict held a gathering within the Sistine Chapel with a global group of a number of hundred artists of many disciplines, together with the artists Invoice Viola, Anish Kapoor and Jannis Kounellis, and the architects Daniel Libeskind and Zaha Hadid. Benedict referred again to an equal assembly that Paul VI had held 45 years earlier wherein Paul had instructed the 1964 group: “We want you. We want your collaboration as a way to perform our ministry, which consists, as you recognize, in preaching and rendering accessible and understandable to the minds and hearts of our individuals the issues of the spirit.”
In 2021 Pope Francis opened a recent artwork gallery within the Vatican library. With that gesture he adopted up on remarks he had made in within the 2015 e book La Mia Thought di Arte (my concept of artwork)—primarily based on his conversations with the journalist Tiziana Lupi—when he stated: “The Vatican Museums should try to be a spot of magnificence and welcome. They have to embrace new types of artwork. They have to throw open their doorways to individuals from world wide and function an instrument for dialogue between totally different cultures and religions, an instrument for peace.”
Francis attended the 2024 Venice Biennale, the primary pontiff to go to the occasion, when he toured the Vatican pavilion and talked about the late Catholic nun and activist Corita Kent—together with Frida Kahlo and Louise Bourgeois—as feminine artists whose works have “one thing essential to show us”.
Cultural restitution
Underneath Francis, the papacy made a lot of symbolic gestures round creative and cultural restitution. In November 2022 Francis ordered the Vatican Museums to return three Parthenon marble fragments to Greece, which had been held of their collections because the nineteenth century.
The three sculptural fragments had been held by the Gregoriano Profano Museum, dwelling to the Holy See’s collections of antiquities. They embrace a part of the top of the horse pulling Athena’s chariot within the frieze on the west facet of the Parthenon, and parts of the heads of a boy and a bearded man.
This gesture was freighted with diplomatic symbolism because it adopted Francis’s 2021 go to 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 go to to the Parthenon.
“Historical past makes its weight felt, and right here, right now,” Francis stated, “I really feel the necessity to ask anew for the forgiveness of God and of our brothers and sisters for the errors dedicated by many Catholics.”
Local weather change
Francis set a strong mannequin for addressing local weather change in Catholic doctrine by issuing Laudato Si’, which addressed the local weather disaster, and calling for shared stewardship of the surroundings. That encyclical, issued within the lead-up to the signing of the UN’s 2015 Paris local weather accord, was the primary time that the Catholic church had made local weather change a part of its educating. Throughout his Venice Biennale go to in 2024, Francis addressed a crowd of 10,000 in Piazza San Marco, emphasising the hazard that local weather change posed to town. “Venice is one with the waters on which it stands, and with out the care and safety of this pure surroundings it might even stop to exist.”
Francis linked the local weather emergency to earnings equality, and the pope’s mission to the poor, one thing that Leo publicly supported final November at a convention on local weather change held in Rome by the embassies of Cuba, Bolivia, and Venezuela to the Holy See.
“The human surroundings and the pure surroundings deteriorate collectively; we can’t adequately fight environmental degradation except we attend to causes associated to human and social degradation,” Francis wrote in Laudato Si’ . “In reality, the deterioration of the surroundings and of society impacts essentially the most weak individuals on the planet… For instance, the depletion of fishing reserves particularly hurts small fishing communities with out the means to exchange these assets; water air pollution significantly impacts the poor who can’t purchase bottled water; and rises within the sea stage primarily have an effect on impoverished coastal populations who’ve nowhere else to go.”
