"Rodolfo Papa on RAI 1's "In punta di matita": directed by Alessandra Peralta and Giancarlo Ronchi" By Carlo Coppola
Questo articolo nella versione lingua italiana è apparso su giornale "In città Giovinazzo" diretto dal prof. Antonio Calisi al seguente link: https://www.incittagiovinazzo.it/2026/06/21/rodolfo-papa-va-su-rai-1-in-punta-di-matita-regia-di-alessandra-peralta-e-giancarlo-ronchi/
The reflection on the relationship between Faith and Beauty — a title we borrow without dispute from Niccolò Tommaseo — is a theme Christian thought has discussed since the second century, when Saint Justin Martyr, Origen, and later Saint Augustine were its earliest interpreters. The debate then experienced a particularly fertile season during the Renaissance and the Baroque. Over the past three centuries, however, and especially since the lead-up to the French Revolution, it has often fallen into the hands of those who, driven more by hearsay than by genuine knowledge of the tradition, sought to innovate without the necessary foundations, introducing spurious and syncretic elements into the discourse. In some extreme cases, this has led to the paradox of iconological systems and architectural projects that call themselves Christian yet are devoid of Christ, enriched instead by esoteric symbolism that has grown steadily less hidden over time. As many recent studies teach us, it is above all artists who today, more than ever, are called not merely to be practitioners of art but also theorists, producing through their works clear manifestos of the foundations of their own Faith. This reflection finds expression through the means of our own time: not only books, but also interviews, podcasts, and television documentaries, through which the public can understand, deepen, and unveil the false coverings of the "lying bridesmaids."
There is a thread linking, almost providentially, the red pencil of a new television programme to the brush that has portrayed two Popes: it is the thread of the via pulchritudinis, that beauty which, according to Benedict XVI, "wounds" the heart and opens it to transcendence. Rodolfo Papa — painter, sculptor, and theorist of sacred art, Ordinary Academician of the Pontifical Insigne Accademia dei Virtuosi al Pantheon — today embodies, with singular continuity, this twofold vocation: that of communicator and witness.
From Saturday 13 June, closing out "A Sua Immagine" on Rai Uno at 4:40 p.m., and running until 19 September, Prof. Rodolfo Papa hosts "In punta di matita" ("At the Point of the Pencil"), directed by Alessandra Peralta and Giancarlo Ronchi: fifteen weeks, five minutes per episode, a true "express pencil sketch" in which, using red chalk, he draws live in Milan, Florence, and Naples, interweaving well-known masterpieces — Leonardo's Last Supper, the Florentine Baptistery, the Caravaggio-rich Pio Monte della Misericordia — with lesser-known treasures such as Santa Maria presso San Satiro or Fra Angelico's frescoes at the Convent of San Marco.
But it is in sacred art that his reflection reaches its greatest theological depth. As the author of the portraits of Benedict XVI for the Cathedral of Sulmona — the "Barque of the Church" steered by the theologian Pope, painted in the light of midday to console an Abruzzo wounded by the earthquake — and of the entire decorative cycle at Bojano, Rodolfo Papa has long meditated on the legacy that the Supreme Pontiff Benedict XVI set forth in the Sistine Chapel in 2009: authentic beauty as an arrow that "wounds" and awakens, not aestheticism but an epiphany of divine Glory, in keeping with the teaching of Augustine and von Balthasar.
His series devoted to female figures proclaimed Doctors of the Church and Patronesses of Europe — Hildegard of Bingen, meditated upon through Pope Benedict XVI's 2010 catecheses, and Saint Thérèse of the Child Jesus, born out of conferences held at the Pontifical Urbaniana University — together with his portrait of Leo XIV chosen for the mosaic in the gallery of popes at the Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls, confirm a poetics faithful to the principle laid down by Pope Stephen I: "Nihil innovetur, nisi quod traditum est" ("Let nothing be innovated except what has been handed down"). Onto this is now grafted the theme of the Tower of Babel, dear to Papa for over thirty years and taken up again in the recent Leonine encyclical Magnifica Humanitas: the choice between Babel and Jerusalem, between chaos and edification. Even on the small screen, then, the artist never ceases to teach us how to see.
