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Collection of Modern Religious
Art & the Apostolic Palace |
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It was Pope Paul VI (Giovanni Battista Montini) who had the intuition to
realize the need to open a Collection of Modern Religious Art in the Vatican
Museums. In the seventh volume of our series, we visit this collection of
over 500 works of art by 250 artists in 55 rooms. All the exhibits are
donations made by artists and collectors who are honored to find room in so
prestigious a place as the Vatican Museums.
The idea for this collection by Giovanni Battista Montini goes far back to
1931, when, before he was made Pope, he wrote about how there existed a
distance, or rather a tormented friendship, between the Church and
contemporary artists. Artists of religious works seemed to draw very little
inspiration from the modern world and had recourse to old-fashioned styles
so that their works were often no more than exercises in skill with little
spiritual feeling or religious inspiration. The crisis of contemporary man
is absent from these works, there is none of today's society... the problems
seem to be other... there is no conciliation between spirit and material...
between God and man. According to Montini, what was needed instead was to
find an alliance, or at the least a dialogue, to seek new values and points
of contact. This, then, was the goal set, an invitation that might be
expressed as Christ in man!
Contemporary artists met the challenge. So in the exhibition rooms of the
collection there are paintings of men crucified in place of Christ, cities
dying and burning in the martyrdom of war... with graphic symbolism that
conveys the evident tragedy of human crisis without hiding the reality of
mankind in soulless empty forms. In this, the works evoke the tragedy of the
human condition in the world of today: a condition that was Christ's.
A startling example is a work by Matisse. "It would never have been thought
that this artist whose works seemed irremediably closed to the supernatural,
could become so impassioned with a task of this sort." So wrote Matisse,
referring to himself in the third person and recounting his growing interest
in his work on the apse windows, the choir, the nave and the mural
decorations in the Rosario Chapel of the Domincian Sisters in Provence. The
Vatican collection has the final full-size drafts of this project. The works
frequently return to the theme of the crucifixion as, for example, in the
painting by Marc Chagall in which the artist places himself next to the
figure of Christ who is wearing a loin cloth similar to the Jewish prayer
cloak. It is as if the painter wanted to associate the torment of artistic
creation with that sacrifice.
Another common theme is maternity and, therefore, the Madonna. A painting to
be noted is that by the Japanese artist Foujita who worked and studied in
Paris and unquestionably came under western influence without, however,
losing any of his own cultural tradition.
The Collection of Modern Art is well placed in the Papal palace not far from
the Raphael Rooms and the Sistine Chapel. As the camera passes through a
series of small-sized rooms in which traces remain of the earlier 18th
century building, it discovers beautiful works of art by Chagall, Gauguin,
Utrillo, Odilon Redom, Braque, Klee, Kandinsky, Moore, Morandi and De Pisis.
In the rooms below the Sistine Chapel it comes across, among other things,
stained glass work by Legex, Villon, Moisetermann, tapestries by Buffet, a
collection of naive paintings, ceramics by Picasso and sculptures by Marini.
LENGTH: 1 x 60 Minutes
ORDER CODE: JM20061V
VHS
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