Vatican Museums

In the mid-Seventies Pedro Cano began to paint abrazos, symbolic visions of an historical moment of exceptional importance, but loaded with universal messages. With the shift to democracy in Spain, Greece and Portugal, scenes of greetings between common people, between the exiled and their families, were intensified. Only later did the artist decide to devote an entire cycle of work to the subject, which extended to the beginning of the Eighties, when he realised the Embrace between Pope John Paul II and Cardinal Wyszynski, one of the last works in the series.
“In the beginning”, explains Cano, “it was one of many anonymous embraces, then everyone’s histories were mixed up with History”, and the mental image, from which the painting originated, was associated with a real event: the embrace, on 23 October 1973, between John Paul II, who had been the Pontiff for only seven days, and Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski.