Angel resembling Meloni painted over after outcry from church and state
The angel’s face was gone when the church opened its doors on Wednesday.
Call it divine intervention, or maybe just a hasty fix-it job to put an end to days of speculation and scandal. But the end result is that the Angel Meloni is no more.
A painting of a cherub with a face bearing a remarkable resemblance to Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni attracted large crowds to the Basilica of San Lorenzo in Lucina, one of the oldest basilicas in Rome.
The angel’s face was gone when the church opened its doors on Wednesday – the cherub’s body remains, but the face has been erased with a sloppy slab of paint or plaster.
La Repubblica newspaper, which broke the story on Saturday when it published the Meloni-esque angel on its front page, said the restorer responsible for the Meloni cherub had covered it up overnight at the request of church authorities.
Restorer Bruno Valentinetti admitted to the paper that he had styled the angel on Meloni, but did not say why.
The diocese of Rome and the Italian culture ministry had both launched investigations after the image of the cherub was first published.
The original painting only dated from 2000, so it was not a matter of damage to the church’s historic patrimony. But Cardinal Baldassare Reina, the pope’s vicar for Rome, said that a political figure had no place in church art.
The row gave the basilica newfound celebrity status, with curious locals and tourists lining up to photograph the Meloni cherub, at times disrupting Mass.
Mr Valentinetti had first made the image in 2000, when one of the basilica’s front chapels was renovated to include a bust of the last king of Italy, Umberto II.
Included in the decoration was a cherub holding a map of Italy, seemingly kneeling down before the king.
The cherub was restored after water infiltration damaged the basilica starting in 2023, and emerged with the face of Meloni.
The investigations that were launched were to identify how the original 2000 cherub looked, with the aim of restoring the painting to that image. The faceless cherub on Wednesday appeared a temporary fix to erase Meloni’s likeness from the work.
Ms Meloni had made light of the whole thing. “No, I definitely don’t look like an angel,” she wrote on social media on the weekend with a laughing/crying emoji alongside a photo of the work.
