Venturino Venturi’s sculptures accompany the celebration led by Pope Leo XIV. A journey between beauty and spirituality
The Via Crucis, led by Leo XIV, opens in the name of art. The theater of Christ’s passion could only be the Colosseum, a symbol of beauty at a national and global level, with its glorious thousand-year history. The stations are combined with the splendid works of Venturino Venturi, a protagonist already at the end of the nineties under the teaching of John Paul II. A return to tradition, in short, and a bond strengthened with an artist of immense value, whose works convey that powerful spiritual charge that best suits the Via Crucis.
The peculiarity of Venturi’s works
The distinctive characteristics of Venturi’s works lie in the ability to combining the spiritual dimension with a contemporary artistic language. The late artist, who passed away in 2002, created fifteen embossed aluminum sheets in the 1980s. In the faces of the passion of Christ, all the drama and suffering in carrying the cross. A “rough, harsh and raw” expressiveness that gives back to Jesus his most human dimension, in his tired and painful gaze.
The Via Crucis through art
A similar moment, the fulcrum of the Christian faith, with the son God who sacrifices himself to give man eternal life, is narrated with extreme precision in each of the fourteen stations of the Via Crucis. From the fall under the unbearable weight of the cross to the meeting with Mary, up to the crucifixion, nothing is left to chance: every gesture, every look, is functional to the narration of the Christian message. Paintings and sculptures that inextricably link art to faith, precisely, transforming the works into instruments of devotion. Faith through a beauty that transmits emotion, empathy. Venturi he transformed the drama of the crucifixion into a universal reflection on painon suffering and the condition of man, making the message of the Gospel current. Making it more accessible.
At the end of the intense Easter process, the works will return to the Venturino Venturi Museum in Loro Ciuffenna, in Valdarno, the place of origin of one of the most brilliant artists of 20th century Italian art.
