The Vatican is to show religious art this year at its Venice Biennale debut – a surprise entrant that may ruffle a few feathers. Italy is a Catholic country, but should the Biennale reflect Italian belief?
Isn't it a worldwide art event where all ideas, traditions and cultures are equal?
Surely there is no more reason for the Vatican to show art at the Biennale than for the Church of England to run the British Pavilion.
If visitors to the Biennale want a religious moment, they do not need to see whatever contemporary take on Catholic art the Vatican plans to unveil, for this city is full of Christian masterpieces that offer a contemplative sacred retreat from the hubbub of the art festival.
They can visit the church of San Zaccaria, between the Biennale gardens and Piazza San Marco, to see Giovanni Bellini's ethereally calm and stilled 1505 masterpiece that shows the Virgin and saints beneath a golden mosaic dome.
Or go to the church of Santa Maria della Salute, whose interior is the grandest and most dwarfing enclosed space in Venice, a sombre manifestation of divine mystery built to mark a devastating 17th-century plague.
In the Accademia gallery hangs Titian's Pieta, his introspective last work praying for his own and his son's survival in another plague outbreak, while the Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni and Scuola di San Rocco are among the city's distinctive religious institutions whose walls and ceilings groan with great art.
The Biennale is about superyachts.
It is about art that will be forgotten in time for the next Biennale, when everything will be new, new, new all over again.
It is fun, but not profound.
I saw plenty I liked last time but none of it has stayed in my heart, where Titian's Frari altarpiece, arguably the greatest artwork in Venice, has a permanent place.
The Vatican should stick to what Catholic Italy does best – quiet churches, free to enter, where glories of Renaissance and baroque art surprise the unsuspecting visitor with feelings of awe and intimations of something beyond this frenetic life, with its Biennales that come and go.