La crisi d’immagine del cardinalato nell’arte italiana dal secondo dopoguerra al post-Concilio

The image crisis of the cardinalate in the Italian art from Post World War II to Post-Vatican II. Since the post-World War II, the Catholic world has to face a deep secularization of social life, which affected the Church by means of a harsh anti-hierarchical protest. Above all in the framework of either Catholic or secular Italian culture, the Church order was stigmatized as being a top-down and self-referential power, far away from the authenticity of the faith. Cardinals portraiture, from this point of view, holds a relevant space in the symbolic experience of the Italians since it handed down the archetype of the “princes of the Church” as well as Aristocratic scions or bureaucrats aspiring to rule over the Church, together with Pope. This article, through visual sources (including sculpture, paintings, film), proposes a social and cultural analysis that point outs a widespread cardinals iconography in terms of ecclesial hierarchy far from the contemporary society, to whom it can only offer the relief of arid and vain ritual formulas. At the beginning of the seventies, the Paul VI’s reform of the Curia might be seen as a Hierarchy attempt to get closer to the society and to fulfil the challenges of the Church-world relationship.