Pope Leo XIV marked his 71st birthday on September 14th by opening “AQVA. Catastrophe and Wonder,” a new exhibition at the Vatican Apostolic Library anchored by a monumental installation by the French artist JR. The work, titled Diluvium, stretches nearly 230-feet across the library’s 16th-century facade. The work depicts a towering black-and-white wave drawn from Gustave Doré’s 1866 wood engraving of the biblical flood. It is the first site-specific art installation ever commissioned for the building’s exterior.
“Catastrophe and Wonder” will explore historical threats to the written word—water, fire, light, insects, and human intervention—as allegories for humanity's fears and hopes. The water-themed inaugural show, on view to the public from September 25 through May 14, 2027, pairs JR’s massive installation with another work by the artist, Undae, an installation in the Barberini Room showing a black-and-white video of a wave recorded in Brazil, along with a typography-based series by American artist Bill Moran, gastronomic writing by Italian chef Fulvio Pierangelini, and Vatican holdings including two copies of Ippolito Salviani’s landmark 1557 study Aquatilium animalium historia, a treatise on fish. The show is curated by Don Giacomo Cardinali, Simona De Crescenzo, Francesca Giannetto, and Delio Proverbio, and organized in partnership with Fondazione Roma and Intesa Sanpaolo.
JR described the project as originating in the library’s own anxieties. “The library at the Vatican came to see me because, for them, water represents their biggest fear,” the artist told designboom. “It’s the fact that one day water comes and takes away all the memory ... all the trace of a civilization that they’ve been preserving.”
He said the wave’s meaning extends beyond that literal threat, linking it to climate change, political polarization, and “the wave of AI itself.” In a statement, the artist added: “There is something almost mystical about books. These fragile objects contain the thoughts of the world; they carry voices, stories and knowledge across centuries. Their strength is immense, and so is their vulnerability: paper resists none of the elements. By bringing a wave into the Vatican Library, Diluvium and Undae confront this paradox. What can survive, and what do we choose to preserve?”
The inauguration marked Pope Leo’s first visit to the library since his election in 2025. In remarks at the opening, he described the Vatican Apostolic Library as “a heart,” explaining that “a beating heart is a symbol of life, and it results from two opposing movements, systole and diastole: a contraction and a relaxation, a movement towards the center and another towards the periphery.” Archbishop Giovanni Cesare Pagazzi, the Holy See’s librarian and archivist, told EWTN News that the exhibition’s pairing of centuries-old holdings with contemporary artists demonstrates that “generations are intertwined.”
This isn’t the first time the pontiff has positioned art as a means of communicating complex contemporary issues. In August, Pope Leo announced the Catholic Universities Art Triennial, titled “Exercises in Empathy,” as a salvo against the rise of A.I.
from Artsy News https://ift.tt/hBPv4zp
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