ROME — One night in early 2019, Rome street artist Alessia Babrow glued a stylized image of Christ she had made onto a bridge near the Vatican. A year later, she was shocked to learn that the Vatican had apparently used a reproduction of the image, which featured Babrow’s hallmark heart emblazoned across Christ’s chest, as its 2020 Easter postage stamp.
Babrow sued the Vatican city-state’s telecommunications office in a Rome court last month, alleging it was wrongfully profiting off her creativity and violating the intent of her artwork. The lawsuit, which is seeking nearly 130,000 euros ($160,000) in damages, said the Vatican never responded officially to Babrow’s attempts to negotiate a settlement after she discovered it had used her image without consent and sold it.
“I couldn’t believe it. I honestly thought it was a joke,” Babrow told The Associated Press in an interview, standing steps from St. Peter’s Square. “The real shock was that you don’t expect certain things from certain organizations.”
The Vatican is home to some of the greatest artworks ever made, and it vigorously enforces its copyright over everything from the Sistine Chapel to Michelangelo’s Pieta. But now the tables have turned, and the Vatican stands accused of violating the intellectual property rights of a street artist.
The Vatican stamp office declined to comment on the lawsuit, said its chief, Massimo Olivieri. The Vatican press office also declined requests for comment.
Copyright lawyers familiar with the case say it is an important benchmark for Italy and evidence of the increasing appreciation for Banksy-style street art. They say it underscores that even anonymous graffiti or “guerrilla art” deserves protection against unauthorized corporate merchandising, or, in this case, church merchandising.
Massimo Sterpi, whose Rome firm has represented Banksy’s Pest Control agency in copyright cases, said intellectual property law in much of Europe and the United States protects artists’ rights even if a piece was created on public or private property illegally.
“The law considers it irrelevant if the work is made on paper, canvas or a wall or a bridge,” Sterpi said. People who commercialize street art without making good-faith efforts to find the artist and negotiate use of the image “do so at their own risk and peril,” he said.
The artwork in question is a 13.8-inch-high printed picture of Christ styled on the famous work by the 19th-century German painter Heinrich Hofmann. On Christ’s torso is Babrow’s telltale tag: An image of a human heart with the words “JUST USE IT” written graffiti-style across.
The work is part of Babrow’s “Just Use It” project, which began in 2013 and has included similar hearts on Buddhas, the Hindu deity Ganesha and the Virgin Mary that can be found on walls, stairwells and bridges around Rome. A huge version also graces a palazzo scaffolding.
The concept of the project, Babrow says, is to “promote the intelligence and the brain of the heart” in a holistic, nonjudgmental way. The Vatican printed an initial 80,000 stamps of the Christ at 1.15 euros apiece, according to the lawsuit. The stamps and a commemorative folder were still on sale at the Vatican post office last week and were prominently featured at the cashier’s desk as a promotional item for sale.
Babrow says she created the Christ image on Feb. 19, 2019, and glued it soon thereafter onto a travertine marble wall just off the main bridge that leads to the Vatican, one of a dozen or so pieces of poster art she put up that night around central Rome. The work bears her scripted initials inside the heart.
