Giacomo Manzù (1908-1991), son of a cobbler and sacristan of a small parish of the Bergamo province in the North of Italy, would go on to become an internationally known artist and the most trusted sculptor of Pope John XXIII. He devoted himself to sculpture after receiving his first commission in 1929, the decoration of the chapel of Università Cattolica in Milan. In 1933 he exhibited a series of busts at the Triennale di Milano, which granted him national popularity.
In 1936, while visiting Rome, he was struck by the sight of cardinals surrounding the Pope in St. Peter's Basilica: two years later, in 1938, he sculpted the figure of a Roman Catholic cardinal, initiating a sequence of more than 50 bronze sculptures of seated or standing cardinals. He also produced many tender portraits of female figures, such as the Portrait of Francesca Blanc which earned him the Grand Prix of the Rome Quadriennale in 1942, and the countless works inspired by his muse and wife Inge Schabel, a German ballerina and the life-long companion of Manzù.
In 1948 he was awarded the first prize for Italian sculpture at the Venice Biennale. In 1950 he was selected by Pope Pius XII to create a set of monumental bronze doors - the Door of Death - for St. Peter’s Cathedral in Rome. The project finally saw the light in 1964, after Pope John XXIII took interest in Manzù's work; he assigned the artist his official portrait, as well. In 1957 he was commissioned to design the central doors for Salzburg Cathedral. His last great work was the six-meters-tall sculpture facing the ONU seat in New York, inaugurated in 1989.
Spirituality has undeniably been both an inner-born necessity and a source of creative and artistic inspiration for all civilizations since the beginning of time. The works of Giacomo Manzù symbolize this ancestral need through a minimalist artistic expression; this aspect of his work is visible both in the Door of Death in St. Peter's Basilica and in his sculptures of Cardinals, which embody an absolute solemnity that can be found in representations of religious figures across cultures, as well.
The clothing of Manzù's Cardinals acts as a visual statement of a recognizable spiritual role: it encapsulates the human figure, fusing together with it and becoming an indissoluble whole. This kind of iconography is common throughout cultures. The focus on clothing comes hand in hand with stillness; a contemplative stance completes the images not only of Manzù's Cardinals, but of Buddha, or Daruma, or Tara, for example.
Thus, Giacomo Manzù Cardinals are a universally understandable signifier of a spiritual leader or religious figure of relevance, despite referring to a specific background.