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\n\tPope Leo XIV addressed a group of directors of globally renowned museums on Saturday at the Apostolic Palace at the Vatican, underlining the Catholic Church\u2019s \u201cspecial affinity with the arts.\u201d <\/p>\n
\n\tThe pontiff spoke to members of the Bizot group, also known as the International Group of Organizers of Major Exhibitions, whose member institutions include the Louvre in Paris, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the National Gallery of Singapore, the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the British Museum in London, and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, among other world-class institutions.<\/p>\n
\n\tFounded in 1992, the group takes its name from Ir\u00e8ne Bizot, former director of France\u2019s R\u00e9union des Mus\u00e9es Nationaux, who was instrumental in its establishment. Rijksmuseum director Taco Dibbits is its current president. The organization\u2019s members met in Rome and Vatican City, including at the Vatican Museums, for a meeting devoted to the theme of materiality.<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cArt is the means by which persons, through their ingenuity, enhance and transfigure matter\u2014that is, the creation in which they dwell as made in the image and likeness of God,\u201d Pope Leo said in his address on Saturday. \u201cThe theme of your meeting, \u2018Materiality,\u2019 is therefore of particular interest, not only for exploring the relationship between an object and the interpretation of a work of art, but also for reflecting on the distinctive quality of matter as the place in which God chose to reveal himself.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tQuoting a 2015 letter from Pope Francis, the current head of the Catholic Church compared artists with Jesus, saying that Christ \u201cworked with his hands, in daily contact with the matter created by God, to which he gave form by his craftsmanship.\u201d Matter is also memory, said Leo, adding, \u201cThe works preserved in museums bear witness to a history that speaks to every person, from one generation to the next. Museum objects thus offer to the present the wisdom of the past.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cI therefore congratulate all of you for your efforts in directing and administering the museums to which you devote yourselves, safeguarding a heritage that belongs to all humanity,\u201d he concluded his remarks.<\/p>\n
\n\tThe address to museum directors came just days after the pope spoke to artists and curators, saying that the Church needs them, adding, \u201cThis is especially true in this age of artificial intelligence, in which we urgently need to distinguish human art from what is produced by machines.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/pope-addresses-museum-directors.jpg?w=1024″] Pope Leo XIV addressed a group of directors of globally renowned museums on Saturday at the Apostolic Palace at the Vatican, underlining the Catholic Church\u2019s \u201cspecial affinity with the arts.\u201d The pontiff spoke to members of the Bizot group, also known as the International Group of Organizers of Major Exhibitions, whose member […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-2199943","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2199943","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2199943"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2199943\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2199943"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2199943"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2199943"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}