Why Did Pope Leo XIV Invoke Van Gogh in His First Address?

Pope Leo XIV invoked Vincent van Gogh’s “Sower at Sunset” (1888) in his first general audience on Wednesday, May 21, using the painting to illustrate his reflections on the biblical Parable of the Sower. The Pope ruminated on the Dutch Post-Impressionist painter’s work while speaking to a crowd of some 40,000 people at Saint Peter’s Square at the Vatican, where he also called for an end to Israel’s “heartbreaking” attacks on Gaza.

The Pope applied the parable to van Gogh’s golden hour composition of a supersized sun setting over a field of wheat as a farmer sows seed closer to the foreground.

“And it strikes me that, behind the sower, van Gogh depicted the grain already ripe,” the Pope told his audience, referencing the lush crop depicted through the artist’s defined, impasto brush strokes. “It seems to me an image of hope: one way or another, the seed has borne fruit.”

The Parable of the Sower is introduced in the New Testament’s Gospel of Matthew, which describes Jesus telling a crowd of people a story in which a farmer indiscriminately sows his seeds across different terrains. Some of the seeds fall on pathways to be eaten by birds; others fall among rocks and grow quickly, only to scorch and wither with excess sunlight and no place to take root; and finally, the seeds that land beneath thorns grow to choke the other plants. Only the seeds that nestle in good soil get to proliferate.

Jesus explains to his disciples that the seeds picked by birds equate to when someone is given the message about the kingdom of heaven and does not understand it, “the evil one comes and snatches away what was sown in their heart.” The seeds that die as quickly as they grow on the rocky terrain refer to the people who receive those messages with joy, but abandon them when faced with persecution. Those that fell within the thorns, Jesus says, “refer to someone who hears the word, but the worries of this life and the deceitfulness of wealth choke the word, making it unfruitful.”

But the bounty that emerges from the good soil refers to those who hear the word and understand it.

During his address, the Pope also found meaning in different elements of van Gogh’s composition — such as the farmer’s offset positioning, with the setting sun dominating the scene. Perhaps, the pope said, this feature serves to “remind us that it is God who moves history, even if he sometimes seems absent or distant.”

Born Robert Prevost of Chicago, the Supreme Pontifex was appointed as the first North American to hold the role on May 8, just weeks after the death of Pope Francis near the end of April. Left with the Vatican’s immense collection of historical and contemporary artworks and furnishings, Pope Leo XIV has also been bestowed with Pope Francis’s public legacy of championing art, artists, and accessibility for both.