Vatican Exhibition Surveys ‘The Work of Man’ : Art: With an eye to ‘the workers’ Pope’ Leo XIII, paintings from the 19th and early-20th centuries document human struggle in the age of industrialization.

As a young priest-diplomat, Gioacchino Pecci watched the dawn of the Industrial Revolution in 19th-Century Europe with a keen and compassionate eye. He saw change overturn lifestyles and centuries of tradition in the countryside. He saw cities swell amid the growth of sweatshop factories and what William Blake would call “dark satanic mills.” He saw suffering.

In 1878, nearly 68 and infirm, Pecci became Pope Leo XIII--a transition figure, his peers believed. But Leo reigned 25 years, passing into history as “the workers’ Pope” after an 1891 encyclical called “Rerum Novarum,” which defended private property but also workers’ rights, social justice, trade unions and just wages.

Now, a century later, the Vatican Library recalls Leo’s landmark encyclical with a striking exhibition of paintings documenting the revolutionary and often degrading change in the human condition that he witnessed with concern.

Called “The Work of Man in Painting From Goya to Kandinsky,” the Vatican exhibition, which cost $2.5 million to assemble, runs through March 1.

Museums and private collectors from around the world have loaned 96 paintings to create a crisp, sharply organized show of powerful art with a strong social message. They are all from the Age of Change: from the early 19th Century to the edge of World War I.

An initial section introduces the new 20th Century with its leading actors--workers, their cities and factories, and their supporting players: steam, electricity and rapid communication--exemplified by black, snorting, liberating/intimidating locomotives.

The section is highlighted by two loans from the Hermitage in St. Petersburg: Camille Pissaro’s horse-drawn and light-hearted “Boulevard Montmartre” (1897) and Pablo Picasso’s angular “Brick Factory at Tortosa” (1909). From the Munich City Museum comes Wassily Kandinsky’s 1909 “Railway Near Murnau” and from the Hungarian National Museum in Budapest, Pal Szinyei Merse’s soaring 1878 “Hot Air Balloon,” which is featured on the cover of the exhibition catalogue.

A second section of the show, an alluring blend of town and country, explores work as reality, allegory and symbol. Paintings include Vincent van Gogh’s “Two Peasants Planting Potatoes” (1885) from the Kunsthaus in Zurich; Francisco Goya’s 1810 “The Water Bearer” lent by Budapest’s Szepumuveszeti Museum; and Kazimir Sverinovic Malevich’s “The Woodcutter” (1913) from the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.

A religious section of an exhibition that marks not only Leo’s teaching but also Pope John Paul II’s recent 100-years-later encyclical “Centesimus Annus” is Caspar David Friedrich’s “Easter Morning” (1835) from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection in Lugano.

A fourth section of the exhibit, a show within a show, examines the dark, uncompromising 1880s work of Belgian artist Constantin Meunier, including his moving “Funeral at the Coal Mine,” from the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Brussels.

The Vatican’s new exhibition, which will likely draw more than 100,000 visitors, is climaxed by a tough, 30-picture section called “The Social Question” that underlines concerns voiced by two Popes a century apart: poverty, social exclusion, migration, anger, and what Leo denounced as “undeserved misery of the workers.”

The social realism is unvarnished here: an 1840 view of the slave trade; an 1850 portrait of an Irish family felled by famine; a blind beggar in Milan; beggar children in Moscow; a hospice in Amsterdam; a pawnbroker in Rome.

The City Art Galleries of Manchester, England, contributed the 1885 work by Hubert von Herkomer called “Hard Times,” showing a homeless English agricultural worker and his family camped by the roadside. Raffaello Gambogi’s quayside “The Emigrants” (1895), from the Civic Museum at Livorno, ought to hang at Ellis Island.

Eugene Laerman’s “A Night on Strike, the Red Flag” (1893), from the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Brussels, is preface for the communism that flourished in the despair of angry workers after World War I and gripped large parts of Europe until yesterday.

The Vatican Library exhibition “The Work of Man” at the Braccio di Carlo Magno in the left-hand colonnade of St. Peter’s Square is open until March 1 every day except Wednesday from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Admission is about $8.50. The 350-page exhibition catalogue (“Fabbri Editori”) costs about $48 at the exhibition and about $70 at bookstores in Italy.