“I put them together as if here they were one,” she said. “He leans in and listens to what Pope Benedict says, and you can see he’s thinking about something beautiful.”
The portraitist has also chosen to include the women who help Benedict every day with the cooking, cleaning, and laundry: Sisters Cristina, Carmella, Loredana, and Rosella from the Memores Domini community. She called this Benedict’s “Pontifical Family.”
In the painting, Sister Carmella, she explained, is sewing a button on Benedict’s cassock.
“There is a folk saying: if you want to make a wish, you must sew on a button. And then Sister Carmella makes a wish that the pope will always be healthy,” Tsarkova said, adding, with a smile, that one would have to speak to the sister to know what she is really wishing for.
Tsarkova’s first official papal portrait was of St. John Paul II. She created a total of three drawings and three oil paintings of the Polish pope; the first was done for his 80th birthday during the Jubilee Year 2000 and now hangs in the Vatican Museums.
Over the course of her career, she has painted the saints, the Virgin Mary, and the Last Supper, and has done portraits of the popes and cardinals, among others.
Tsarkova’s portraits of Pope John Paul I and Benedict XVI are also displayed in the Vatican Museums.
In 2001, she was allowed into the synod hall to paint the general assembly of the Synod of Bishops.
While working on her latest painting, Tsarkova would often visit the pope emeritus to do sketches or to take pictures of him and his environment to take back to her studio.
The hardest part of the painting to get right, she said, was Benedict’s face. But she also spent a lot of time on the overall composition: “I did not want the movements within the painting to repeat any other movements. It all has to be in harmony.”
The Moscow-born artist was working on the portrait during the COVID-19 pandemic, including the months-long lockdown in Italy.
During that time of isolation, alone with only her pet owl, Tsarkova said the painting kept her company.
“I used to get up and say: ‘Good morning, Holy Father!’ and when I went to bed, ‘Good night, Holy Father!’” she recalled.
Tsarkova, who is Russian Orthodox, said she sees Benedict as “a teacher, a father, and a friend.”
During the pandemic, the Vatican sent her fruits and vegetables from the gardens, and Benedict sent her a prayer book, “so we could pray together,” she said.
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