Pope Leo XIV told a meeting of leading international museum directors at the Vatican this weekend that “the works preserved in museums bear witness to a history that speaks to every person”. The pope met with members of the Bizot Group, officially known as the International Group of Organisers of Major Exhibitions, on 10 October.
The pope added that “every museum is a place of memory, beauty and history, fostering encounters between generations and promoting culture and human creativity.” The pontiff’s endorsement of museums was welcomed by attendees at the forum including Tristram Hunt, the director of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
In an Instagram post, Hunt highlighted the pope’s message—that art should be approached less through an aesthetic framework and more as “a means of proclaiming the Gospel through beauty.” This, says Hunt, is a “refreshingly confident and certainly different message to the usual commentary, not least for the opening of Frieze Week [in London].”
Max Hollein, the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York who was also at the Bizot meeting, commented on social media that “His Holiness spoke profoundly on the importance of art, museums and memory.” The Bizot Group, founded in 1992, meets periodically to discuss issues such as institutional policies; it is currently led by the Rijksmuseum director, Taco Dibbits.
The museum forum reaffirms the Vatican’s commitment to arts and culture following the pontiff’s warning that artificial intelligence (AI) could be a threat to the creative endeavours of humans.
In a previous address on 2 October, he said to a group of artists and curators: “The Church needs you. This is especially true in this age of artificial intelligence, in which we urgently need to distinguish human art from what is produced by machines. There is an ontological difference—even before an aesthetic one—between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others..”
The pontiff made his comments at a meeting organised by the Vatican’s Dicastery for Culture and Education. “Algorithms lack the spark of the human, whereas authentic culture and art preserve this spark,” the pope added, quoting his first encyclical letter, Magnifica Humanitas, which was published in May.
Meanwhile, the Holy See’s exhibition opened in Venice in May featuring high-profile artists, poets and musicians such as Brian Eno, FKA Twigs and Precious Okoyomon. The Vatican show, The Ear is the Eye of the Soul (9 May-22 November), is based on the life and legacy of the Benedictine nun Saint Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), who was a medieval abbess, poet, healer and composer.