Pope Francis’ Artistic Taste: Alejandro Marmo, “Martin Fierro,” and Babette

The deceased Pontiff’s favorite artist, poem, and film tell us something of his ideas about the social and prophetic role of the arts. 

By Massimo Introvigne

April 26, 2025

Francis meeting the artists in the Sistine Chapel, June 23, 2023. Screenshot.

Pope Francis did not have the knowledge of art history and criticism of his predecessor, Benedict XVI. He continued the periodical meetings with the artists, but his speeches were less memorable than Benedict’s. Nonetheless, Francis was not without his own artistic tastes. He appreciated modern artists as prophets disturbing our false quiet.

In his speech to the artists for the 50th anniversary on June 23, 2023, of the Vatican Museums’ collection of modern art, he told them: “You are a bit like prophets. You can see things both in depth and from afar, like sentinels who strain their eyes, peering into the horizon and discerning deeper realities. In doing so, you are called to reject the allure of that artificial, skin-deep beauty so popular today.. You want to distance yourselves from that kind of beauty; instead, your art strives to act as a conscience critical of society, unmasking truisms. You want to make people think, to be alert; you want to reveal reality also in its contradictions and in those things that it is more comfortable and convenient to keep hidden. Like the biblical prophets, you confront things that at times are uncomfortable; you criticize today’s false myths and new idols, its empty talk, the ploys of consumerism, the schemes of power. This is an intriguing aspect of the psychology of artists: the ability to press forward and beyond, in a tension between reality and dream.” 

In his 2015 book “My Idea of Art,” Francis insisted on artists’ social and prophetic roles. He mentioned Argentinian artist Alejandro Marmo as a favorite example. Since Marmo is known for his works devoted to Evita Perón, perhaps the Pope reminisced about his own youth as a Peronist militant in Argentina. Francis was instrumental in having works by Marmo installed in the Vatican and elsewhere in Italy. Critics would not include Marmo among the greatest contemporary artists. However, what Francis appreciated in his works, installations, and performances was Marmo’s use of waste material and cooperation with the poor and the marginalized for his presentations. Again, the Pope was more interested in the social role of the artist than in the intrinsic value of the works.

“The Virgin of Lujan,” a work in the Vatican Gardens realized by Alejandro Marmo with waste materials. From the documentary inspired by Francis’ book “My Idea of Art.”

Two further artistic references recur throughout Francis’s speeches and interviews: the Argentine national epic poem “Martín Fierro” and the 1987 Danish film “Babette’s Feast,” directed by Gabriel Axel and based on a story by the Danish writer Karen Blixen.

The poem “Martín Fierro” was written in 1872 by José Hernández, a dignitary of the Argentine Freemasonry. Still, it is considered the national poem by Argentines, on the basis of which the “Day of Tradition” is celebrated every year on November 10, the poet’s birthday, even by Catholics, whose relations with Freemasonry are not good. The tradition referred to is that of the gauchos, the cowboys of Argentina, protagonists of a world that, as Pope Francis noted, today “is more alien to most of our young people and children [in Argentina] than the mystical-futuristic scenarios of Japanese comics.”

Among the many interpretations of “Martín Fierro,” Bergoglio chose the one that reads the poem in the light of its 1879 sequel, also by Hernández, “The Return of Martín Fierro.”

While in the first work the gaucho protagonist seems to reject civilization, in the second he is educated and gradually integrates into society. This integration, Francis commented, is necessary. On closer reading, the poem “is not driven by a kind of nostalgia for a ‘lost gaucho Eden.’” On the contrary, “The gaucho must have a home, a school, a church, and rights.” The gaucho is a kind of barbarian or wild man who becomes civilized through his home, that is, through settling down, school, the Church, and the law, i.e., the legal framework that guarantees his rights.

But, Francis asked, “What does the gaucho have to do with us,” who obviously do not live in the Argentine pampas of the 19th century? A lot, he answered. The “gaucho” is a native barbarian—albeit one with his own values, as were the so-called barbarians of the late Roman Empire—while today we are faced with a returning barbarian, a man who has become barbaric. 

The first edition of “Martin Fierro” (1872). Credits.

“There are,” Francis explained, “two types of ‘incivility.’” Today, what we see is “a second form of lack of culture,” characterized by enthusiasm for pseudo-cultural products and also by the “social suicide” of declining birth rates. If we look at the process that has developed over the last century and is now ending, “history appears to us as a disaster, a moral failure, chaos.” We are faced with “localist hermits in a global world” and “brainless and mimetic passengers in the tail end of the van, sitting admiring the fireworks (of others) with their mouths wide open and their applause programmed.” 

Having reached an “anthropological regression,” we can understand the comparison with “the invasion of the barbarians in 400 AD” and the idea that the second-degree lack of culture, the shipwreck we are facing today “is what determines catastrophes and ultimately leads humanity, in a certain sense, to have to start all over again.” It is a question of civilizing the new barbarians, a task more difficult than that of the fifth century or of nineteenth-century Argentina with the “gauchos,” using the same tools: “home, school, church, and rights.”

Encountering shipwrecked people means, as Francis repeated often, “going out” from the sacristies of a “self-referential” Church and going to the “peripheries of existence,” in search of the “poor.” But who are the poor? There are two types, Francis reiterated: the materially poor and the spiritually poor. He claimed that his favorite film, “Babette’s Feast,” might help understand the problem. Here we see Babette, a cook fleeing repression after the Paris Commune, taking refuge in a strictly Protestant Danish village led by two grim spinsters named Martina and Filippa by their parents in honor of Martin Luther and his collaborator Philip Melanchthon.

As Francis noted, “they belong to a Calvinist world [in terms of lifestyle, because in reality they are Lutheran] and are so puritanical that even Christ’s redemption is seen as a denial of the things of this world. […] It was a community that did not know what happiness was. It lived crushed by pain. It clung to a semblance of life. It was afraid of love.”

After years of trying to integrate into this world so far from Paris, Babette wins the National Lottery. She decides to spend her winnings on organizing a memorable banquet in the village, with the finest foods and wines. An elderly general among the guests says that the food reminds him of the old “Café Anglais” in Paris, where cooking was an art and an “adventure in love.” He says this without knowing that the cook at the “Café Anglais” in those days was Babette herself. At the end of the meal, the Lutheran sisters tell Babette that she would surely have enough money left over to be rich. But this is not the case. Babette has spent everything on food, wine, tablecloths, plates, and glasses. And when Martina tells her, “Now you will always be poor,” Babette replies that “An artist is never poor.” 

From “Babette’s Feast.” Screenshot.

A beautiful film, indeed – it won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1987. Nonetheless, for those who have a certain image of poverty, Francis’ enthusiasm for it may seem incomprehensible. The Danish community where Babette lived was not starving, but it was poor. Why on earth, some would say, did Babette not distribute her money to the poor instead of wasting it on Veuve Cliquot champagne, turtle soup, Clos Vougeot Louis Latour wine, and gold-rimmed glasses?

But Babette is right, and the objection may be safely dismissed. Because there is material poverty, which Francis taught must be addressed, and there is poverty of meaning, of happiness, of civilization among barbarized men and women who, like the gauchos of old, must be civilized. The cuisine, the wine, the splendor of the tablecloths, the plates, the glasses—all things that are not very “Calvinist” but are very Catholic—offer the inhabitants of that remote Danish land much more than a bit of material help. They offer beauty, art, and the opportunity to walk toward civilization.

Even the minor arts, such as interior design and gastronomy, are arts and make a decisive contribution to the path towards beauty, an antidote to the modern spread of ugliness, and the first element in civilizing the new barbarians. This is what happened with the Argentine gauchos, who were offered culture, the church, and the law. 

“When a breath of freedom arrives, in the form of a sumptuous dinner,” explained Pope Francis, speaking of Babette, “everyone is transformed.” This was certainly not an invitation to neglect material poverty, which had such a large place in Pope Francis’ concerns. But it was a warning to consider that those who suffer from an “anthropological regression” need more than bread alone.

Source: bitterwinter.org