The Vatican exalts with an exhibition the friendship between the French philosopher Jacques Maritain and San Pablo VI

The Vatican museums inaugurated on Thursday the exhibition “Pablo VI and Jacques Maritain: the renewal of sacred art between France and Italy (1945–1973)”, a tribute to the friendship between the famous French philosopher and the Pope who gave the relief to John XXIII and concluded the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965).

The core of this initiative is precisely Jacques Maritain (1882-1973), neotomist thinker and key figure in the dialogue between faith, culture and art of the twentieth century. Appointed ambassador to Charles de Gaulle after World War II, Maritain resided in Rome between 1945 and 1948. At that time his friendship with Giovanni Battista Montini (the future Paul VI) was consolidated, whom he had met in Paris in 1924. His thought influenced the foundations of the Vatican Council II, particularly with his idea of ​​a “integral humanism”, in which the Christian faith converges, in which the Christian faith converges, in which the Christian faith converges, in which Human dignity and artistic expression.

Together with his wife Raïssa Oumançoff, with whom he became Catholicism in 1906, Maritain was the center of an international intellectual elite that integrated poets, philosophers, artists and mystics such as Charles Péguy, Leon Bloy, Paul Claudel, Jean Cocteau and Georges Rouault, the latter considered by Maritain as one of his most artistic interpreters close.

The sample, which is part of the 2025 and can be visited throughout the summer, commemorates several significant ephemeris: the eighties from the appointment of Jacques Maritain as an ambassador of France before the Holy See, in 1945, and the almost simultaneous foundation of the San Luis de los French Cultural Center; The sixty anniversary of the Clausura of the Second Vatican Council, in December 1965, and the inauguration of the collection of modern religious art, promoted by Paul VI in 1973, which took place in the same month of June in which we opened this exhibition.

For the director of the Vatican Museums, Barbara Jatta, those anniversaries “make clear the richness of historical stimuli that this project offers to the public of the Pope’s museums.”

The exhibition – through photographs, documents and paintings that put the spiritual and intellectual link between the French philosopher and the then Monsignor Giovanni Battista Montini, whose friendship was reinforced during the Roman years of Maritain as a diplomat between 1945 and 1948.

“The relationship with the Pontiff lasted far beyond the diplomatic experience and was very intense during the Second Vatican Council, whose gestation contributed Maritain’s neotomist thinking,” Jatta said.

The beginnings of the art collections of the Vatican

He also recalled that Maritain and his wife Raïssa, of Russian origin, formed throughout the twentieth century an international cultural circle of great influence, in which artists, thinkers and religious figures converged. In fact, the marriage also gathered a significant collection of works of art, many of which became part of the initial funds of the collection of modern religious art of the Vatican museums.

“These are important presences at the beginning of the Vatican collection, because in addition to reiterating the uninterrupted and reciprocal esteem between Montini and Maritain, they underline how the latter immediately understood the scope of Paul VI project, of which the philosopher himself was one of the theoretical engines,” said Jatta.

This project acquired a public and official form with the famous speech to the artists pronounced by Paul VI in the Sistine Chapel on May 7, 1964, where he asked to heal the “divorce between the Church and contemporary art.”

In fact, that petition culminated with the opening of the collection on June 23, 1973 “in the historical heart of the Vatican museums, between the Borgia apartment and the old environments that lead to the Sistine Chapel.”

The exhibition gathers paintings, drawings, engravings, photographs, period volumes and material objects that document an intense network of friendship and collaboration between thinkers and artists committed to the spiritual renewal of art.

Among the most prominent artists are Maurice Denis, Émile Bernard, Gino Severini (with works for Swiss churches promoted by Cardinal Charles Journet), Georges Rouault (perhaps the closest artist to Maritain), and Marc Chagall, very friend of Raïssa, whose visual stories reveal a unique sensitivity inspired by the Jewish folk. There are also works by Henri Matisse, with his famous chapel of Vence, and the American William Congdon, artist of strong mystical inspiration, known by Maritain in the years before the Council.

The figure of the Dominican Marie-Alain Couturier, another great renovator of sacred art in France, whose perspective, more progressive and different from Maritain’s, is integrated into the sample as a sign of the opening of Paul VI to multiple currents within contemporary Catholic thought.

Commissioned by Micol Forti, responsible for the collection of modern and contemporary art of the Vatican museums, the exhibition is located in the heart of the exhibition journey dedicated to the art of the present, between the rooms of Rafael and the Sistine Chapel.

The exhibition is the fruit of a collaboration between the Vatican Museums and various cultural institutions, such as the Embassy of France before the Holy Headquarters, the San Luigi Cultural Center of the French