Ten years after his mural of Pope Francis as a superhero went viral, Italian street artist Maupal has been adopted by the Vatican, which is using his works to inspire the faithful.
“I have created a form of empathy with Pope Francis,” the artist, whose real name is Mauro Pallotta, told AFP at his studio in Rome.
For Lent this year, the period of prayer and fasting running up to the Christian celebration of Easter, the Holy See has been sending out weekly images by Maupal to dioceses across the world.
It is a far cry from a few years ago, when the artist was painting images intended to satirise the Catholic Church, including one of a cardinal asking a nun to marry him.
Today, he says he has “one foot” in the Vatican, working with the Church and meeting the Argentine pontiff several times.
It is all thanks to a painting he posted one evening on a wall in January 2014 in his neighbourhood, a few steps from the Vatican.
It showed Francis in his white papal robes with one arm stretched out above his head and the other holding a briefcase inscribed with the word “Values” from which escapes a scarf from the pontiff’s San Lorenzo football club back in Buenos Aires.