Critico dell’arte e curatore
The Ecclesiastical Magisterium in Artistic Reflection
The image of God and the power of the Trinity—as well as scenes of saints and martyrs—have, for many centuries, found in the boundless expressive modes of Art – from mosaic to fresco, from Byzantine icons to oil painting – an extraordinary means of making themselves visible to humankind, awakening an imaginative faculty that had hitherto lain dormant.
In earlier times the world was hardly as colourful or spectacular as the modern age. Colour and the beauty of form were luxuries dispensed only by Nature; they were absent from everyday dress and activity. Art, however, worked a miracle: it gave faces, images, forms and colours to a religious conception which—despite the solemnity of austere liturgies—remained confined to a blind, often obscure faith, lacking concrete visual references. Religious teaching was handed down by strict oral tradition through sermons and homilies, genuine occasions for theological formation but chiefly for clerics and the learned. The illiterate and the uneducated, if not entirely excluded, remained on the margins of dogmatic teaching and the mysteries of Scripture.
An enlightened pope, Gregory I the Great (c. 540–604)—saint and Doctor of the Church, already instrumental in converting Queen Theodelinda’s Lombards to Christianity—was the first to perceive the power and value of sacred images for pastoral outreach. In his famous letter of 599 to Serenus, Bishop of Marseilles—an iconoclast wary of idolatry—Gregory highlights the evocative power of images: they are indispensable to the illiterate, just as words are to those who can read and write Latin. In that memorable reflection, as forceful and indelible as if carved in stone, the pope asserts that sacred figures recall the substance of long sermons, rendering the message of the Holy Spirit—breath of the anima mundi—simple and immediate, animating and inspiring the protagonists of Christian Tradition.
It is easy, in light of this, to imagine the wonder and emotion centuries later when people first stood before Giotto’s Stories of St Francis in Assisi or, later, Masolino and Masaccio’s Stories of St Peter in the Brancacci Chapel in Florence: the brilliantly coloured garments, the gilded haloes, the flesh tones and expressions. Or to picture the imperious, solemn face of the Eternal Father in the Sistine Chapel—white-bearded, his gaze containing all the Light of the Wisdom of Creation. God, then, takes on human features and wears a rose-coloured robe, and Michelangelo, as if he had truly seen Him, reveals Him to us. Everything becomes more real, plausible, concrete: the divine Word is now supported by eloquent images, electrifyingly close to human experience. Illuminated scrolls, papal bulls and manuscripts, enriched with miniatures, likewise enhance comprehension of their texts, rendering them more intelligible—even to scholars and clerics.
In our own day, John Paul II’s historic Letter to Artists (1999) remains a lodestar for creative minds. Pope Wojtyła—himself a poet and actor in youth—quotes the stern Old-Testament ban on portraying the “invisible and inexpressible” God, who “transcends every material representation.” Yet he dispels all legitimate doubt: the incarnate Word may indeed be depicted in recognisable form because, through the process of enfleshment, He manifested Himself and descended among humankind to fulfil His ministry. This assertion—overcoming the “I am who am” pronounced to Moses in Exodus—resolves the biblical prohibition. Art, further liberated by Constantine’s Edict of 313, thus becomes a “privileged channel” and complementary instrument for spreading Church teaching. The Church, Pope Wojtyła concludes, needs Art. Contemplation of the risen Christ and veneration of the “all-fair” Virgin stand, together with the power of Faith itself, among the foundations of that Beauty which will save the world. Created in the image and likeness of our Creator, we may affirm an axiomatic truth: we too can bring forth what was not there before—and Art is its direct testimony.
Renato Li Vigni—man and artist of faith—responds to the disorientation of a troubled present by rediscovering religious values felt first in the depths of the heart, even before the intellect. He knows it would be pointless to return to classical representation and measure himself (inevitably) against the unsurpassable masters of figurative tradition. After thoughtful study he turns instead toward absolute informality, closer to a feeling of the soul than to a vision shaped by imaginative mind.
In his most recent work the spherical form has become a hallmark. His tondi—perhaps metaphors of the unending return to the Origin—evoke the divine perfection of the sacred Circle, Alpha joined to Omega, symbols of God’s eternity. There are no corners, no edges, no asymmetries: everything coincides, everything ultimately returns within what we call the circularity of a Time that is, after all, illusory. Inside the discs appear decisive streaks of colour, like embryonic manifestations of life—motifs that also recur in his rectangular canvases. In these works, material impastos cut into the surface, seeming to open new horizons and unexpected dimensions of pure light.
In the painting dedicated to the 2025 Jubilee—reproduced in the eponymous volume and presented at the Pontifical Marian Academy in Rome—descending light bursts forth and floods the canvas, radiating a flaming warmth of indescribable visual impact. As noted, there are no figurative references: everything resides in interior contemplation, returning to the biblical notion of the inexpressible. In today’s culture, dominated by science and technology, a step back becomes inevitable: the Divine sheds objective features in favour of individual representations, as though each person sensed it in a unique way—an energetic vibration for some, for others simply hidden in details of Nature, or identical with Dante’s Love that moves the sun and other stars.
Li Vigni’s concrete perception focuses entirely on an authentic, absolute, blinding light, sometimes enriched with gold leaf—another of his signatures. The strength of faith and of life is conveyed by that light which determines colour, by that raised matter that thrusts forward as the prologue to creation. Yet this is no inert matter: it is animated, moved by an invisible breath. Here the artist does not depict God’s face, aware of the human impossibility of the attempt. Still, his message reaches us unmistakably: the Divine dwells in all things, visible and invisible, everywhere. Faces and haloes are no longer necessary—we have already seen them. Now is the time to look beyond, freed from pre-set systems of belief, moving ever closer to an awareness that surpasses the allure and evocative power of icons—for God is within us.
Audio OFF