The history of the Man of Peace

The“Scepi’s Man of Peace”, also known as the “Scepi’s Man for Peace” is the name that the Italian artist gave to the image he painted in Poland in 1977 as an auspicious sign for the end of the Cold War, inspired by the then Archbishop of Kraków, Karol Wojtyła.

The “Man of Peace” painting was used for the first time by Franco Scepi for the poster of Andrzej Wajda’s film the “The Man of Marble”, winner at Cannes in 1978. The work depicts an androgynous head (representing both male and female ‘mankind’) built as a brick wall, with eyes half closed, a prisoner of divisions and misunderstandings, from whose head rose a red dove (the Communist symbol).

The work’s destiny was then characterized by a series of circumstances that mapped out its path, for example, the meetings that Franco Scepi had first with Andy Warhol and later with Mikhail Gorbachev. In 1998, under the initiative and organisational coordination of the Secretary General of the Gorbachev Foundation Italia, Cristiano Grandi (who had secured approval for the idea from the then Mayor of Rome Francesco Rutelli) Rome played host to the first of the “World Summits of Nobel Peace Laureates” and the image created by Franco Scepi became their symbol, because it was considered by the Nobel Laureates to have “foreseen” the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War.

For the summits, Scepi made one small change to the original work: the dove was changed from red to white in order to represent the Nobel Peace Laureates’ thoughts that peace soars high surpassing walls and the divisions between men.

In 1999 the Nobel Peace Laureates Mikhail Gorbachev, Joseph Rotblat, Betty Williams, Rigoberta Menchù Tum, Shimon Peres, Frederik De Klerk and David Trimble presented to John Paul II, during a papal audience in the Vatican, the diptych “ Karol Wojtyla – Man for Peace”, painted by Franco Scepi, depicting the Pope next to the historical image that the artist had conceived in Kraków all those years earlier. On that occasion the Holy Father was also told of the project for a three-metre-high monument depicting the “Man of Peace”, which Franco Scepi fashioned using the 1977 painting as a starting point.

In 2000 the first Man of Peace monument was placed at the Museo Bargellini near Bologna and inaugurated by Mikhail Gorbachev.

In 2002 and following years a second monument, erected in a garden in the Comune di Roma opposite the FAO building, received the signatures of many Nobel Peace Laureates, to each of whom the artist gave a 20-cm-high bronze replica.

In 2002, thanks to an idea by Cristiano Grandi, co-founder and coordinator of the World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates until 2006, the small bronze monuments depicting the image of the Man of Peace have become the award, presented by the Nobel Peace Laureates, to a personality from the world of show business, culture, cinema or music who has stood out in his or her support of the causes of peace, the environment, human rights ad solidarity.