By David Willey
BBC News, Rome

Pope Benedict has invited international artists, sculptors, architects, musicians, film directors and even a solitary Italian prima ballerina to meet him under the soaring vaulted ceiling of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel in the Vatican on Saturday to begin a new dialogue between the Catholic Church and the arts.

Five hundred invitations were sent out to leading figures in the arts around the world last September, and more than 250 acceptances have been received at the Vatican.

Among them are such well-known names such as Anish Kapoor, whose current exhibition at the Royal Academy in London is drawing crowds; Zaha Hadid, the Iraqi-born British architect whose striking new Maxxi Museum of Modern Art has just opened in Rome; Daniel Libeskind, the Polish-born American who won the competition for the reconstruction of the World Trade Centre site in New York; and F Murray Abraham, the American movie star of Syrian descent who won an Oscar for Best Actor for his role as Salieri in the Mozart film, Amadeus, in 1985.

It is an eclectic list in which Italians outnumber all the foreigners. Among them are sculptor Arnaldo Pomodoro; the doyen of film score composers, Ennio Morricone; and opera star Andrea Bocelli.

For the moment, the Vatican is being coy about revealing which artists refused the Pope’s invitation or excused themselves on the grounds of a previous engagement.

The Sistine chapel choir will welcome the artists with a motet by the 16th Century composer Palestrina as they troop into the awe-inspiring chapel where Popes are elected, to hear extracts from a letter addressed by the late Pope John Paul II to the world’s artists exactly 10 years ago.

Pope Benedict will then give his take on the long-established and rich connections between the Catholic Church as patron of most of the arts represented among his extensive guest list.

Crucified frog

Popes love to lecture their guests. John Paul described artists as “ingenious creators of beauty” in his address on the eve of the new Millennium, and distinguished between the roles of “creators” and “craftsmen”.

“The Church needs art,” Pope John Paul wrote, “but can it also be said that art needs the Church” he went on to ask.

In today’s growingly secular societies, art sometimes manages to offend the Church.

“The building of these churches, and the pride the parishioners take in them, show that we have a dialogue with the architects of modernity“

Archbishop Gianfranco Ravasi

A German artist, Martin Kippenberger, who exhibited a sculpture of a crucified frog at an art exhibition in Bolzano in northern Italy last year, got into hot water with the local ecclesiastical authorities.

Pope Benedict’s new reaching out to artists is being masterminded by his newly-appointed culture commissar, Archbishop Gianfranco Ravasi, a biblical scholar, archaeologist and author, who now heads the Pontifical Council for Culture and the Church’s commission for Cultural Heritage.

Within months of his appointment, Archbishop Ravasi was suggesting a Vatican cultural presence not only at the Venice Biennale but at the Frankfurt book fair and “an analogous presence in those places where the new artistic vocabulary is elaborated”.

Addressing the issue of modern artists, he said in a recent interview with Osservatore Romano, the Vatican daily, “experience tells me that there is less a preconceived attitude of rejection [on the artists' part] than their conviction that the Church has long since taken another route. But when we show our interest, the responses we get are mostly positive”.

‘Devil’s work’

The Vatican Museums were opened 500 years ago.