Pope Leo XIV’s Sermon Talks About van Gogh’s The Sower at Sunset
In the pantheon of Vincent van Gogh’s expressive landscapes, The Sower at Sunset (1888) stands as a radiant fusion of form, faith, and feeling. While often categorised under the Post-Impressionist umbrella, this particular painting has re-entered cultural consciousness in a new light, quite literally, after Pope Leo XIV referenced it during his first General Audience as pontiff.
“Behind the sower, Van Gogh painted the grain already ripe,” Pope Leo observed, directing attention not just to the act of sowing, but to the painting’s sun-drenched backdrop and its unusual visual theology. The Pope’s remarks opened a fresh avenue for interpreting a familiar canvas—not merely as a rural idyll, but as a meditation on divine agency, hope, and spiritual abundance.
A Field of Influence: Van Gogh’s Homage to Millet
The Sower at Sunset is part of a broader series Van Gogh pursued in Arles, where he was deeply inspired by Jean-François Millet, the French painter renowned for his depictions of agrarian life. Millet’s own The Sower (1850) had left an indelible mark on Van Gogh, who once wrote that Millet’s figures were “something on high, great, that’s what I want.”
Yet where Millet’s palette leaned toward sombre earth tones and grounded muscularity, Van Gogh injected the scene with a fierce vitality. His sower moves in rhythm with the earth, bathed in the electric hues of a setting sun. The blue-gold palette, in the Pope’s words, “fits theologically well, the blue of hope yields the gold of glory.”
This chromatic choice was not incidental. The year 1888 marked a shift in Van Gogh’s technique and emotion. Moving away from his earlier, muted tones, he embraced vibrant contrasts and thick impasto. The Sower at Sunset reflects this evolution: it is no longer just a man sowing seed, it is an invocation.
The Sun at the Centre: A Shift in Sacred Emphasis
Pope Leo’s exegesis on the painting departs from traditional readings by repositioning the painting’s focus. “The sower is not central; the sun is,” he noted, emphasising the theological undercurrent. In Millet’s version, the sower is the protagonist, brawny, tireless, human. In Van Gogh’s, the sower is smaller, almost absorbed into the glowing landscape, dwarfed by a radiant orb that dominates the sky.
The sun becomes not only a visual anchor but a symbolic stand-in for the divine, a reminder that the harvest is driven by a force beyond the farmer’s hand. “God drives history,” the Pope concluded, “even if He sometimes seems distant or hidden.”
This reading aligns with the Parable of the Sower (Matthew 13:1–23), which Van Gogh alluded to thematically, if not doctrinally. The parable presents seed cast on different types of ground: rocky soil, thorns, birds, and fertile earth. Pope Leo interprets Van Gogh’s sower as God Himself, “scattershot” in his sowing but generous beyond reason.
Art as Catechesis: A Painter’s Sermon in Oil
Though Van Gogh was not a religious painter in the conventional sense, his work often wrestled with spiritual longing. A former lay preacher and theology student, he turned to art after being rejected by the Church. And yet, few modern artists created with such reverence for the sacred in the ordinary.
The Sower at Sunset is arguably one of Van Gogh’s most devotional works. There is no altar, no martyr, no saint, only a man, a field, and a sun that blazes like a halo over the earth. The act of sowing becomes liturgical. The furrows in the soil resemble the grooves of a sacred text; the wheat, communion; the horizon, promise.
Art, for Van Gogh, was not an escape but an encounter. In a letter to his brother Theo, he wrote: “I want to reach that point where people say of my work: that man feels deeply, that man feels keenly.”
Ripeness and Revelation: The Field Already Grown
One of Pope Leo’s most intriguing reflections on the painting was his observation of an apparent contradiction: though the sower casts seed, a mature field of wheat already stands behind him. “We’re not sure how it has grown up, but it has,” he said, drawing from John 4:35–37, where Jesus tells his disciples: “Open your eyes and look at the fields! They are ripe for harvest.”
This dual temporality, sowing and harvesting at once, mirrors God’s view of time. The divine harvest is not constrained by human seasons. The ground, fractured though it may be, is blessed. Even the tree in Van Gogh’s foreground, which appears barren, holds the suggestion of spring’s return in its budding branches.
Van Gogh in the Vatican Mind
That a new pope should choose to speak on Van Gogh in his first address is noteworthy. The Vatican’s collections brim with Renaissance majesty, Raphael, Michelangelo, and Caravaggio. Modern artists are seldom granted papal reflection. Yet Pope Leo’s decision aligns him with his predecessor Pope Francis, who broke precedent by attending the 2024 Venice Biennale and returning colonial-era artefacts held in the Vatican Museums.
In elevating Van Gogh, Pope Leo recognises that modern art speaks to modern hearts. In The Sower at Sunset, he sees an artist wrestling with darkness and still choosing to paint the light.
A Canvas of Grace
The Sower at Sunset may depict a lone farmer, but it is, in essence, a collective portrait of spiritual yearning, ours and Van Gogh’s alike. Its sunlit field reminds us that grace can erupt from even broken ground. The act of sowing, so humble, so hopeful, becomes a metaphor for faith itself: we scatter seeds not knowing the outcome, but trusting the warmth of something greater.
As Pope Leo XIV so movingly articulated, “Parables invite us not to stop at appearances.” Nor should we stop at pigment or brushstroke. In Van Gogh’s blazing sunset, we glimpse not just the end of a day, but the radiance of a harvest yet to come.
Image Courtesy – Wikipedia
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