Luigi Gregori: the Vatican painter who founded the department

1819 – 1896 · Notre Dame's professor of art 1874 – 1890

Luigi Gregori (1819–1896): the first artist of the record, and the founder of art teaching on this ground. Born in Bologna in 1819, he was apprenticed at fourteen to Giovanni Battista Frulli, trained at Rome's Accademia di San Luca under Tommaso Minardi, and became an artist in residence at the Vatican, where he painted a portrait of Pope Pius IX; the Bologna academy made him an honorary professor of history painting in 1868. In June 1874 Father Edward Sorin, in Rome and searching for an art professor, engaged him on the Vatican's recommendation as director of Notre Dame's art department. Gregori arrived at Notre Dame on July 30, 1874, aged fifty-five, and stayed seventeen years — the catalogues of his work give his tenure as 1874 to 1890, and his American life as running to 1891.

The work: Gregori adorned the Church of the Sacred Heart — now the Basilica of the Sacred Heart — across seventeen years: the nave, transept, ceilings and apse, the murals the Notre Dame record counts at fifty-six, and the Stations of the Cross, painted from 1874 to 1877, two of which were shown at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 before installation. He painted for the Main Building and Washington Hall as well, and in 1875 his sixty portraits of bishops opened the Bishops Gallery in the Main Building — the founding display of the university's art collection, whose origins the museum dates to that year. Nearly five hundred of the university museum's drawings are his; the Snite Museum's 2012 exhibition of his working drawings, Artist in Residence, was the modern reassessment of a painter the 1881 Notre Dame Scholastic had boasted of in his own time: in no college in the country, it declared, was painting carried to such perfection as at Notre Dame.

The Columbus murals: Gregori's largest secular commission came after the Main Building burned and was rebuilt in 1879. Commissioned by Sorin in 1881 and painted in 1882–84 directly on the plaster of the new building's second floor, the twelve murals of the life of Christopher Columbus — each eleven feet tall — were a didactic program for a largely immigrant Catholic student body, braiding Catholic faith, Italian pride and American patriotism. Their romanticized portrayal of Columbus and of Native Americans drew protest across recent decades — a 1995 call for removal by Native-American students, a 2017 letter signed by more than three hundred students, employees and alumni — and on January 20, 2019, the university's president, Father John I. Jenkins, announced they would be covered rather than removed. In September 2020 the murals were covered with removable tapestries made by Conrad Schmitt Studios, their designs drawn from local plant life and the artwork of the Pokagon people; high-resolution images are published by the university, an exhibit stands on the second floor, and the murals themselves are uncovered for set instructional weeks each academic year — in the fall of 2026, August 31 to September 4 and October 26 to 30. The paintings remain in place beneath the fabric.

Sources:

1. Snite Museum of Art, Artist in Residence: Working Drawings by Luigi Gregori (1819–1896) (2012 exhibition catalogue) — the Bologna and Rome training, the Vatican residency, the June 1874 engagement by Sorin, the arrival of July 30, 1874, the tenure of 1874–1890, the nearly five hundred drawings, and the 1881 Scholastic boast.
2. Raclin Murphy Museum of Art, "How We Started" (raclinmurphymuseum.nd.edu) — the 1874 hiring, the 1875 Bishops Gallery of sixty Gregori portraits, and the collection's 1875 origin.
3. University of Notre Dame, "Columbus Murals" (nd.edu) — the twelve murals painted 1882–1884, the January 20, 2019 letter of Father Jenkins, the autumn 2020 covering with removable tapestries by Conrad Schmitt Studios, and the 2026 instructional uncovering weeks.
4. Notre Dame Magazine, "Columbus Murals Covered" (2020) — the 1881 commission, the coverings' landscape designs, and the murals' preservation in place.
5. University of Notre Dame, the Basilica of the Sacred Heart record as carried in the Notre Dame section of this history — the fifty-six murals and the Stations of the Cross, two shown at Chicago in 1893.