After Caravaggio at Vinitaly, Bernini at the airport: the Salvator Mundi at Fiumicino Terminal 1

After Caravaggio at Vinitaly, we now have Bernini at the airport. Indeed, if the great Lombard painter’s Bacchus was not enough at the wine fair, as of today at Terminal 1 ofFiumicino’s “Leonardo da Vinci” airport the last masterpiece by Gian Lorenzo Bernini is on display, the Salvator Mundi from the church of San Sebastiano Fuori le Mura, a work from 1679 found in the Roman church only in 2001: it is a marble bust that was intended for Queen Christina of Sweden, and upon her death was donated to Pope Innocent X.

The display of Bernini’s masterpiece is organized in conjunction with the Ministry of the Interior (the church in fact belongs to the Fondo Edifici di Culto, a Viminale entity whose origins can be traced back to the ecclesiastical demanializations of the 19th century) and is intended to celebrate the reopening of the new Terminal 1 boarding area, an infrastructure equipped with 22 gates, through which 6 million passengers travel annually.

Terminal 1 was inaugurated this morning in the presence of the Minister of Infrastructure and Transport, Matteo Salvini, the Undersecretary for Culture, Vittorio Sgarbi, the President of Enac, Pierluigi Di Palma, theChief Executive Officer of Ita Airways, Fabio Lazzerini, the President of the Lazio Region, Francesco Rocca, the Mayor of the Metropolitan City and Municipality of Rome, Roberto Gualtieri, the Deputy Mayor of Fiumicino, Ezio Di Genesio Pagliuca, and Prefect Fabrizio Gallo, Director of the Ministry of the Interior’s Worship Buildings Fund. Speaking for the Group were Mundys President Giampiero Massolo, ADR President Claudio De Vincenti, and ADR CEO Marco Troncone.

The Salvator Mundi will be visible to departing passengers. “The exhibition,” reads a note, “is part of the Leonardo da Vinci hub’s more general strategy of promoting territorial and domestic art and culture to Italian and foreign passengers.” Along with the Salvator Mundi, welcoming passengers will also be another work, a contemporary one: Leo by Marco Lodola, an artist who, on the occasion of the 500th anniversary of Leonardo da Vinci’s death (which occurred in 1519), wanted to represent him with luminous LEDs in many different colors, as a tribute to his brilliant light. At the moment, however, it is not known how long Bernini’s work will remain at the airport. Hopefully as short as possible.

It must be said that, despite being unprecedented for Italy, this is not the first time that ancient works of art have ended up at the airport: the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam had already done so, bringing ten Dutch seventeenth-century paintings to Schiphol Airport in 2017 for a special exhibition. This was unique at the time, although the initiative was closed prematurely due to water seepage into the display case. However, the Amsterdam museum did not give up and eventually created a real exhibition space inside the airport, which is still in operation today.

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After Caravaggio at Vinitaly, Bernini at the airport: the Salvator Mundi at Fiumicino Terminal 1

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