By all accounts, the Italian sculptor Oliviero Rainaldi is taking the public trial of his bronze pope statue in Rome very well. Last week, amid public outcry that the sculpture was “ugly” and did not look like the late Pope John Paul II, the city's mayor summoned a panel of experts. It will decide the fate of the modernist bronze, which stands in a square in front of the busy Termini train station.
The future holds a few possibilities for the art work, donated by a private Catholic group. It could stay as it is, be located elsewhere, or undergo alterations. For the present, the city must also decide how much, and how long, it can pay for the security now required to discourage vandalism.
The massive square bronze statue, topped by a large nub of a papal head, is supposed to offer a gesture of the pope extending a hand of friendship to the world, and as his cape extends as well, offering shelter to the faithful. To critics, the head looks like Mussolini, the bronze hulk like a guard booth or public bathroom.
The sketches for the sculpture had been approved by the head of the city’s Cultural Heritage Department. It is said that even the current pope was pleased at the prospect of a modernist monument to the late pope, especially since it was unveiled this month, a time when John Paul was beatified, a step toward sainthood.
Rainaldi has done other works for the Catholic Church and his collectors are members of the faith. In his statements, he seems a good sport about the controversy. “Usually, I get more compliments,” he told the New York Times. “Otherwise, I wouldn’t have survived in this business for 40 years; they would have stopped me earlier.”
Soon after the statue was unveiled, the Vatican daily newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, criticized the work because it “bears only a remote resemblance to the pope.” This pulled the lid off a good deal of pent of Roman feeling about the statue. No less than the deputy head of Cultural Heritage called it very “ugly.”
As the panel decides what to do, Rainaldi stands in the shoes of other famous sculptors who, truth be told, often reacted with less cooler heads.
The French sculptor Auguste Rodin stood in these shoes in 1891, when a literary society asked him to make a memorial bronze sculpture of Honoré de Balzac, the novelist. After seven years of delay, Rodin unveiled his plaster-cast statue at a great art salon in Paris. It drew so much criticism that the literary group dropped the project and Rodin simply stored the statue at home. In 1939 it was finally cast in bronze. Today it is famous, with duplicate copies in many great museums.
The chief criticism had been that the sculpture did not look like Balzac. That was exactly Rodin’s intention (though he conceded he may have made the neck monstrously too thick). “Modern sculpture must exaggerate the forms,” Rodin said. Gesture is what counted, not resemblance. He imagined the statue showing “Balzac laboring in his study, his hair in disorder, his eyes lost in a dream.”
For historians of modern art, Rodin had done the right thing. After his innovation, sculpture that distorts human form—and even specific personages—has become more widely accepted, and in some art circles even required.
In 1981, the American sculptor Richard Serra stirred an art brouhaha in New York City by taking form in an even more radical direction. A federal public art committee had commissioned him to decorate a large plaza outside of the federal building in lower Manhattan. Serra’s forte was making “site specific” minimalist sculptures. For the Federal Plaza, he designed a wall of rusty steel and called it “Tilted Arc.” At 12 feet high and slighty tilted, the 120-foot-long slab of brown metal curved gently across the plaza.
At first it was a victory for modern art in a public places, since the rusty wall was so conceptually radical. But soon, the public outcry was immense. The arc was called ugly, but mostly a nuisance, blocking pedestrians and views across the plaza. When a federal agency decided to remove it, Serra sued for $30 million, primarily on the grounds that the action violated his right to control the integrity of his art work.
Serra lost in court and the slab was removed in 1989. However, Congress passed a law recognizing the “moral” rights of artists to protect their creations. Under the law, for example, a rightful owner (i.e. buyer) of a painting does not have a legal right to destroy it if the artist protests. In all of this, Serra was not the coolest of heads, as befits his rugged temperament, which returns us to the Rainaldi case in Rome.
This case is unique for erupting in the Catholic tradition, which has long taken pride in great sculpture. True, popes have fitted galleries of naked statues with marble fig leafs. That was before modern art, however. Even so, it seems that modern Romans still want a papal statue that looks something like a pope.
Whatever the outcome, Rainaldi tried his best. He may prove to be the coolest head of all amid this public art ruckus. For that alone he may win his place in history.
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