Recently a modernist sculpture of Pope John Paul II by Oliviero Rainaldi was placed in front of Rome's Termini Train Station. Soon afterward, the official newspaper of the Vatican condemned the statue as unfitting to the memory of the blessed Pope. (1) It has been condemned by Romans on two grounds: the similitude of the statue's head to the head of Mussolini, and the fact that it's non-representative, "it doesn't even resemble the late pontiff." (2) This post defends Rainaldi's statue against these objections.
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| Images provided by the artist, and reproduced here with his consent. |
To the first objection, that the statue is non-representative, I would point out that the Vatican museum itself features a collection of "Modern Religious Art" inaugurated by Pope Paul VI in 1973. This collection features works by such paradigmatically non-representative artists as Paul Klee and Kandinsky. It is apparent in the address by Pope Paul VI upon the inauguration of the collection, excerpted below, that he conceived of modern religious art as (potentially) more effective at communicating to the modern man.
