Pope Leo XIV Makes a Splash for His 71st Birthday, Announcing a Water-Themed Art Exhibition at the Vatican Library

Contemporary sculptures, fish made from typographic elements, centuries-old treatises and historical global cookbooks will feature in the new ‘Catastrophe and Wonder’ art show

Christian Thorsberg | Daily Correspondent

September 17, 2026 3:12 p.m.

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In celebration of his 71st birthday, Pope Leo XIV this week announced the opening of a new contemporary art exhibition at the Vatican Apostolic Library, in Rome. “AQVA: Catastrophe and Wonder” brings together the works of three modern artists and an abundance of old texts to explore water’s life-giving and destructive double nature.  

Open to the public from September 25 through May 14, “AQVA” is the inaugural chapter of a five-year exhibition series, “Catastrophe and Wonder,” that will explore historical threats to the written word—including fire, light, insects and humans—and invite visitors to “look beyond fear to discover new avenues of interpretation and artistic creation,” according to a statement from the pope’s library. The show is being held there in an effort to encourage in-person engagement.

“While on the one hand it is right to facilitate access to this treasure for study, including through digitization and online access, on the other it is also necessary to preserve and encourage the ancient practice of physically making one’s way to the Library,” Pope Leo XIV says in a statement. “For it is not merely a repository of books from which one can conveniently draw using a computer at home, but an atmosphere created by relationships, exchange and the sharing of ideas.”

Two central artworks, one modern and one ancient, ground the exhibition’s aquatic theme. A 230-foot-long sculpture of a crashing black-and-white wave, called Dilivium, stretches across the historic library’s outdoor facade. Created by the French artist JR, the piece recreates the scene of a biblical flood as originally imagined in an 1866 wood engraving by Gustave Doré, reports Artsy’s Katie White. According to the artist, it is a metaphor for existential crises of climate change, polarization and the new frontiers of A.I., which Pope Leo has consistently addressed throughout his papacy.

“The library at the Vatican came to see me because, for them, water represents their biggest fear,” JR tells Designboom’s Kat Barandy. “It’s the fact that one day water comes and takes away all the memory … all the trace of a civilization that they’ve been preserving.” 

Inside the library, two copies of Ippolito Salviani’s 470-year-old treatise Aquatilium Animalium Historiae, which contains dozens of engravings and studies of marine life, will be on display alongside other centuries-old artifacts, manuscripts and prints that feature aquatic adventures, beasts, science and myths.   

“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,” Don Giacomo Cardinali, vice prefect and commissioner for exhibition activities, says in the library’s statement. “In doing so, we have discovered unexpected horizons within the very elements that typically daunt us.”

Once visitors have made their way past JR’s sculpture and Salviani’s texts, they will experience a unique combination of fonts and fish. American artist Bill Moran has spent years creating LetterFish, a collection of creatures whose component parts—ampersands, parentheses, letters and other typographic symbols—serve as a visual language unto themselves. Fourteen of these original prints will be on display.

Joining the “art that swims”—as Moran calls his works—are six gastronomic narratives written by the Italian chef Fulvio Pierangelini, whose modern expertise will accompany a global survey of historical cookbooks—from Europe, China, South America, Russia and Japan—that are stored in the Vatican’s archives.  

“I am deeply honored to contribute to this project and its accompanying agenda,” Pierangelini says in the library’s statement. “In both, I share my own interpretation of the fish recipes discovered within a magnificent text preserved with infinite care and wisdom by this extraordinary library.” 

In a separate statement, Pope Leo XIV announced that the library would undergo an expansion project to make room for the Vatican’s growing collection of manuscripts. 

Christian Thorsberg is an environmental writer and photographer from Chicago. His work, which often centers on freshwater issues, climate change and subsistence, has appeared in Circle of Blue, Sierra magazine, Discover magazine and Alaska Sporting Journal.