Pope Francis, Who Championed Contemporary Art, Dies at 88
143April 23, 2025
Pope Francis, who led the Catholic Church for twelve years, during which time he was a vocal and effective supporter of the arts, died on April 21 of stroke and heart failure. He was eighty-eight. The Buenos Aires–born Francis was the first Latin American and the first Jesuit priest to assume the papacy, and in this role sought to bring the Church into the twenty-first century. One facet of his efforts in this department was his embrace of current art and culture; another was his vocal support for repatriation of looted works.
As pope, Francis commissioned new art, inaugurated a contemporary art gallery at the Vatican library, and wrote a book,La mia idea di arte, in which he argued for art’s ability to counter a modern-day “culture of waste.” Concerned also with Renaissance art, he exhibited Raphael’s tapestries in the Sistine Chapel and loaned them prodigiously; oversaw the restoration of Raphael’sStanzefrescoes; and helped to grow the Vatican Museums, which under his leadershiprepatriated three mummies to Peruandreturned several fragments of the Parthenon marbles to Greece. His record on this repatriation was not perfect, nor was his relationship with the Vatican Museums. In 2023, he called for the repatriation to Canada of Indigenous artifacts in the Vatican’s collection; by the following year, however,the objects had yet to be returned, andstaff at the Vatican Museums presented his administration with a petitionalleging “unfair and poor” workplace conditions.
In 2024, the Vatican’s pavilion at the Sixtieth Venice Biennale occupied a historic women’s prison on the island of Giudecca and featured work by Bintou Dembélé, Simone Fattal, Claire Fontaine, Sonia Gomes, Corita Kent, and Claire Tabouret. Some of the roughly eighty women who remained incarcerated on the island participated in the exhibition, their inclusion meant to reflect Francis’s embrace of dialogue, solidarity, and fraternity. Also on view was work by conceptual artist Maurizio Cattelan, known not only for his $6.2 million duct-taped banana, but for his 1999 La Nona Ora, a life-size resin figure of Pope John Paul II sprawled on the floor under the crushing weight of a meteorite. Francis visited this edition of the Biennale, becoming the first pope ever to appear at the event.
“I would like to send everyone this message: The world needs artists,” he said in his address at the Biennale. “I confess that beside you I do not feel like a stranger: I feel at home. And I think that, in reality, this applies to every human being, because, for all intents and purposes, art takes on the status of a ‘city of refuge,’ an entity that disobeys the regime of violence and discrimination in order to create forms of human belonging capable of recognizing, including, protecting, and embracing everyone. Everyone,” he affirmed, “starting from the least.”