CathNews New Zealand

If Pope Francis wanted a single image to illustrate the special Year of Mercy that is the current focus of his ministry and, indeed, the theme at the heart of his pontificate, he could do no better than choosing an underappreciated masterpiece by the thrilling Italian artist known as Caravaggio.

In fact, the 400-year-old canvas, an altarpiece in a Naples church titled “The Seven Acts of Mercy,” may represent the perfect combination of the man — or, rather, two men — and the moment: a brilliant painter with a scurrilous reputation who was striving for redemption, and a popular pontiff struggling to make the church more welcoming to outcasts.

“A dramatic convergence has taken place between Pope Francis’ teachings and Caravaggio’s message,” writes Terence Ward in his new book on the painting, titled “The Guardian of Mercy.”

Even Ward’s book represents a stroke of providence in that he started it years ago after wandering into the church where the painting has hung for centuries, only to have his laptop with the first manuscript stolen.

The delay meant that the publication of Ward’s book coincided with the pope’s Jubilee Year of Mercy, and a revolutionary pontificate that would seem to dovetail so easily with Caravaggio’s boundary-pushing style.

The confluence of developments is also no small irony, and perhaps some posthumous vindication, for an artist who died while desperately seeking mercy from another pope, of an entirely different cast, in an entirely different era.

Michelangelo Merisi was born in 1571 in northern Italy and grew up in the town of Caravaggio — hence his later moniker. He was orphaned at 11, just as he began an apprenticeship in an artist’s workshop. He was known as a hothead early on, however, and had to leave Milan for Rome around 1590, reportedly after getting in trouble for wounding a police officer in a street fight. Continue reading

Sources

• David Gibson, writing in Crux. David Gibson is a national reporter for Religion News Service.
• Image: Wikipedia

Additional reading

News category: Features.