La Via Crucis di Previati a San Pietro: Arte e fede per il tempo di quaresima

From the first Friday of Lent, St. Peter’s Basilica will welcome faithful and tourists with the intense Via Crucis painted by Gaetano Previati (1852-1920), temporarily placed in the transept and along the nave of the church.

The fourteen large canvases were painted in 1902 by the Italian artist, moved by an intimate desire to express his own spiritual quest. Exhibited in Italy and abroad, several times on the verge of being inserted in basilicas and cathedrals, at the beginning of the seventies the Via Crucis was finally given to Paul VI, a refined and attentive connoisseur of contemporary artistic culture, and became part of the Collezione d’Arte Contemporanea dei Musei Vaticani.

It is the first time, however, that the paintings are exposed to popular devotion inside a sacred building. The sequence of the fourteen stations underlines the theme of sorrow and the Passion thanks not only to the tragic and monumental figure of the Savior, but also to the different use of light in the succession of images and the pressing chromatic rhythm. The recent and careful restoration in the laboratories of the Pope’s Museums has brought back the original beauty of the images and colors.