Vincent Van Gogh made an unexpected appearance in the first address of Pope Leo Xiv, at least mentally.
On Wednesday, Chicago natives’ speech pondered Post-Impressionist 1888 paintings Sowingers at sunsetin which the sinking celestial bodies bathed in golden light washed a field. “I was fascinated by the fact that Van Gogh drew the ripe grain behind the seeds,” he said.
Van Gogh returned to pastoral images throughout his career, capturing the fast, thick sunshine and shadows of his two favorite themes Xiaomi and its farmers. He struggled to chase the example of Jean-François Millet’s setting, his 1850 painting Seeder Being admired by Van Gogh.
The sunset scene quoted by the Pope was a turning point in the series as he departed from the blue, violet and grey tones he liked that year, the one he famously cut off his ears.
Pope Leo talks about the painting’s eponymous “The Fable of the Sowinger,” a story told by Jesus in the New Testament about his followers. In that story, a farmer goes to sow his seeds, but encounters indestructible soil. Determined to plant his crops, he searched until he discovered the fertile land. The Pope said that the center of the story is not the seeder, but the huge sphere depicted by Van Gogh in his work, occupying most of the horizon. He concluded that the painting should remind, “Even if he seems sometimes out of reach or hidden, God drives history.”
Fables, he said, encouraged listeners to “ask questions within us; they invited us not to stop on the outside.”
As the highest Pontive, Pope Leo will have jurisdiction over the world’s oldest and most famous art collection: the Vatican museum, which includes a mix of art and artwork, including treasures of Renaissance and Baroque paintings and sculptures, as well as other works of modern art, Francis Bacon Bacon, Francis Bacon, Francis Bacon, and Marc Chigar. In addition to the collection, the historic structural complex, such as the Raphael Room, was named after a series of murals by the painter who decorated the walls, forming a World Heritage Site.
His former Pope Pope Francis, who died on April 20, was 88 years old, leaving an unusually deep legacy in art relative to the modern Vatican. In 2024, when Francis visited the Holy See, he made headlines at the 2024 Venice Biennale, becoming the first pope to participate in a prestigious exhibition. He headed to Venice by helicopter and landed in the Women’s Prison on Judyka, a show on the island “With My Eyes” curated by Chiara Parisi and Bruno Racine and considered in collaboration with Inmates.
Francis first had a conversation about the return of colonial artifacts obtained from indigenous civilizations at the Vatican Museum. Under his guidance, three fragments of Parthenon sculptures held in the Vatican Museum’s collection, which had been held for two centuries, were sent back to Greece.
