Pope Leo XIV Celebrates His 71st Birthday with JR Installation at the Vatican Apostolic Library

Pope Leo XIV had quite the birthday celebration on Monday at the Vatican Apostolic Library in Vatican City, as he opened the exhibition “AQVA: Catastrophe and Wonder.” The show’s inner section was taken over by French artist JR’s massive black-and-white installation Diluvium.

Diluvium stretches nearly 230 feet and depicts an illustration of a biblical flood from 1886 by Gustave Doré. “Creating things for real, you actually connect with people and that’s the heart of my work—to create a bridge between people and institutions, even in a place like this that is harder to reach to, I think the symbol of creating a wave on the library will resonate with libraries around the world,” the artist told Le Figaro.

The visit to the 15th-century library marked the pope’s first visit, following in the footsteps of his predecessors. He described the library like a heart, explaining that “a beating heart is a symbol of life, and it results from two opposing movements, systole and diastole: a contraction and a relaxation, a movement towards the center and another towards the periphery.”

The exhibition also includes new works by two other artists: Barberini Room’s installation Undae, a black and white video of a wave in Brazil, and Bill Moran’s typography series Letterfishes. “Believing that the wisest response to fear is to pause and confront it directly, we invited three extraordinarily creative minds to dialogue with our heritage. In doing so, we have discovered unexpected horizons within the very elements that typically daunt us,” said Don Giacomo Cardinali, who curated the exhibition with Simona De Crescenzo, Francesca Giannetto, and Delio Proverbio.

“AQVA: Catastrophe and Wonder” will be on public display from September 25 to May 14, 2027.