Giorgia Meloni’s face on a church fresco is offensive – but not for the reason the Vatican thinks coloring

IIt must be the ugliest fresco in Rome – and that’s even without the bizarre image of Giorgia Meloni as an angel. Artist Bruno Valentinetti painted a tribute to Umberto II, the last king of Italy, earlier this century in a side chapel of the ancient church of San Lorenzo in Lucena in its historic heart, the Centro Storico. It’s the kind of ugly build-up you try to ignore when basking in the city’s artistic glories which include, in this particular church, a stunning, stormy vision of the Crucifixion by the 17th-century painter Guido Reni, his unforgettable masterpiece.

By contrast, Valentinetti’s fresco is a spontaneous, banal visual effort that did not last even two decades before water damage required its restoration. Valentinetti, now 83, carried out the repairs himself and had the genius idea of ​​giving the face of an angel to Italy’s populist prime minister – a face so distinctive because it is clearly based on photographs of her. What was he thinking? Is he in love? Or was this a sly propaganda?

Given Meloni’s far-right political roots, it may be significant that she is embodied in the church of Italy’s last king. Umberto II’s father, Victor Emmanuel III, collaborated with Mussolini and abdicated for his son in 1946 in hopes of clearing the monarchy’s name. But in a referendum that year, the people chose the republic anyway, and Umberto II went into exile in Portugal. So in the artist’s mind, and in Meloni’s mind, “Who, me?” In reaction to his angelic vision of it, there are perhaps disturbing associations with authoritarian Italy of the early twentieth century.

Perhaps the church suspected this. After removing Meloni’s face, the artist claimed that he was pressured by the Vatican to do so. Cardinal Don Baldo Reina spoke of his “bitterness” toward the artist’s secret portrait, using strong language that conveyed condemnation of Meloni’s unwanted appearance in heaven. This is understandable in our dark times. In Europe’s populist age, you never know what is funny and what is terrifying. The artist may be eccentric or manipulative with lighting—either way Melonie gets free publicity and an undercurrent of the idea that she is somehow holy or chosen by God. It’s funny if you don’t think about it too much, and it would be a little scary if you did.

However, the only thing the cardinal says about art, and religious art in Italy in particular, is nonsense. He believes that it is wrong to paint Meloni in the church, because “images of sacred art and Christian traditions cannot be misused or exploited.” In other words, the sacred and the profane are separate, and Christian art should be free from the contamination of politics or contemporary life. When has that ever been true?

The frescoed churches of Italy are filled with portraits of real people, powerful and famous in their day, depicted as unmistakably as Meloni. At Santa Maria Novella in Florence, you can see women from the wealthy Tornabuoni family depicted in scenes of the birth of the Virgin and the Baptist painted by Domenico Ghirlandaio in the 15th century. In another Florence church, Lorenzo de’ Medici greets his young children and their teacher in a scene from the history of the Franciscan order. These are the naked displays of wealth and status by the leading families in the sacred place of the Church. The Medici went further and had themselves and their friends photographed by Benozzo Gozzoli in their family church in the company of the Magi, heading to the Holy Land. One of their business partners asked Botticelli to depict them as the Magi themselves, wealthy and wise, with Cosimo de’ Medici touching Christ’s feet.

Would these things have made Don Baldo Reina “bitter” if he had been in Italy in the 15th century? Such outrageous, almost blasphemous displays must have appalled Savonarola, who overthrew the Medici in a religious revolution. However, the contemporary images that populate Italian Renaissance art also humanize sacred subjects, pulling art out of the sacred shadow and into real life. While the wealthy paid the price to have their faces included in religious scenes, artists also seized the opportunity to do so in secret, in a brilliantly ambiguous fusion of the sacred and the profane that haunts and fascinates us today.

Perhaps the first artist to do so was Fra Filippo Lippi, a monk who eloped with a nun named Lucrezia Buti. They had two children together, and Lippi appears to be celebrating his partner (they never married) in the depiction of the Virgin. The Virgin and Child in the Uffizi Gallery adorns Mary with ravishing jewels and sheer silks in a way that so outrageously straddles the line between reverence and desire: it is hard to believe that this is not his portrait of Butti.

Some of Rome’s most famous frescoes contain portraits of contemporaries that artists added secretly or informally as private jokes, tributes, or acts of reprisal, even in the heart of papal Rome. Even more surprising is Michelangelo’s The Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel. When a papal official named Biagio da Cesena accused Michelangelo of filling this fresco with male nudes for non-religious reasons, Michelangelo responded by giving Minos, the judge of Hell, the face of Biagio. He stands to this day, in the church where popes are elected, with a snake wrapped around his naked body, closing its mouth on his penis.

What has changed? These were clearly great artists, and their own pictures were miracles of art. Meloni’s photo was an embarrassing act of hacking that deserved to be removed for aesthetic reasons alone. However, our expectations of church art are also different. It must be safe and contemplative, not controversial. This is certainly due, at least in part, to the fact that while Christianity once permeated daily life without barriers between life and faith, its presence in the modern world has become more tenuous, even in Italy. It was overshadowed by politics.

It is probably safe to say that the Vatican under American Pope Leo XIV lay to the left of the Meloni government. So, when Valentinetti brought into his restoration mission a right-wing populist face, implicitly suggesting that Meloni belonged to the angels, the Church opposed it. She may seem like an angel to Bruno Valentinetti, but to many of us she is the devil in disguise.