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Date
03 Dec 2025 - 10 Nov 2025
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Time
13:00 - 14:00
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Venue
Room 1 Concordia, Palais des Nations
Join us for a discussion inspired by the book “Spiritualità” with the authors
Michelangelo Pistoletto and Father Antonio Spadaro
moderated by Prof. Francesco Monico, Curator of the book
Hosted by H.E. Archbishop Ettore Balestrero, Permanent Observer of the Holy See and H.E. Ambassador Vincenzo Grassi, Permanent Representative of Italy.
Overview of the Book
A master of contemporary art—a creator of symbols and forms—and a Jesuit, a renowned exegete with a passion for art, interweave a dizzying dialogue in these pages. The words of Michelangelo Pistoletto and Father Antonio Spadaro do not merely meet; they chase and challenge one another, tracing an unpredictable path that probes the very essence of what it means to be human. At the heart of this conversation—developed over the years and matured like a symphony—emerge themes of spirituality understood as “fermentation,” the architecture of thought, a longing for an afterlife and for meaning, and the need to build a peace capable of dwelling in the world. At the same time, art extends its direct relationship to the entire fabric of society, enabling spirituality to fully reclaim its role.
With rich, evocative prose, the volume succeeds in braiding theory and practice, emotion and intellect, opening up vistas and leaving a deep impression on the reader. It is an invitation to rediscover wonder, to reflect on one’s place in the universe, and to imagine new horizons of humanity on the brink of an unimaginable future.
Biographies of the authors
Antonio Spadaro (born 1966), a Jesuit, is Undersecretary of the Vatican Dicastery for Culture and Education. He served for many years as editor of La Civiltà Cattolica, is a commentator on Rai Radio 1, contributes to la Repubblica, and writes the Gospel column for Il Fatto Quotidiano. With Marsilio he has published L’atlante di Francesco and Una trama divina (both 2023), and he edited Pope Francis’s volume La saggezza del tempo (2018), his Apostolic Exhortations Gaudete et exsultate (2018) and Querida Amazonia (2020), and his Encyclical Fratelli tutti (2020).
Michelangelo Pistoletto was born in Biella in 1933. He began exhibiting in 1955, and in 1960 held his first solo show at Galleria Galatea in Turin. His early painting was marked by an inquiry into the self-portrait. In 1961–62 he created the Quadri specchianti (Mirror Paintings), which directly incorporate into the work the presence of the viewer and the real dimension of time, and which also reopen perspective, overturning the Renaissance perspective that the twentieth-century avant-gardes had closed. With these works, Pistoletto quickly achieved international recognition and success, leading already in the 1960s to solo shows in prestigious galleries and museums in Europe and the United States. The Mirror Paintings would form the basis of his later artistic production and theoretical reflection.
Between 1965 and 1966 he produced a group of works entitled Oggetti in meno (Minus Objects), considered fundamental to the birth of Arte Povera, a movement in which Pistoletto was both a driving force and a leading figure. Beginning in 1967 he carried out actions outside traditional exhibition spaces—early manifestations of the “creative collaboration” he would develop over the following decades—bringing together artists from different disciplines and ever broader sectors of society. Between 1975 and 1976, at Galleria Stein in Turin, he realized a cycle of twelve consecutive exhibitions, Le Stanze, the first in a series of complex year-long works he called “continents of time,” such as Anno Bianco (1989) and Tartaruga Felice (1992). In 1978, at Galleria Persano in Turin, he presented a show in which he set out two fundamental directions for his future research and artistic production: Divisione e moltiplicazione dello specchio and L’arte assume la religione. In the early 1980s he created a series of sculptures in rigid polyurethane, later translated into marble for his 1984 solo exhibition at the Forte di Belvedere in Florence. From 1985 to 1989 he created a series of “dark” volumes titled Arte dello squallore.
Throughout the 1990s, with Progetto Arte and with the creation in Biella of Cittadellarte–Fondazione Pistoletto and the Università delle Idee, he placed art in active relationship with diverse realms of the social fabric, aiming to inspire and bring about a responsible transformation of society. In 2003 he was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale. In 2004 the University of Turin conferred on him an honorary degree in Political Science; on that occasion the artist announced what would become the most recent phase of his work, known as Terzo Paradiso (Third Paradise). In 2007, in Jerusalem, he received the Wolf Foundation Prize in Arts “for his consistently creative career as an artist, educator, and activator, whose tireless intelligence has given rise to prophetic art forms that contribute to a new understanding of the world.The dialogue between art and politics promoted by the Third Paradise also took shape in 2015 with the creation of Rebirth, a permanent artwork located in the park of the United Nations Palace in Geneva. It is composed of 193 stones, one for each member state of the United Nations, arranged to form the symbol of the Third Paradise.