Giacomo Manzu; Atheist Sculpted Doors for Vatican

Giacomo Manzu, 82, Italian sculptor who created the bronze “Doors of Death” in St. Peter’s in the Vatican. Often at odds with the Catholic hierarchy because of his atheism and his mocking figures of cardinals, Manzu was a close friend of Pope John XXIII, who prodded him to sculpt the mammoth doors dedicated in 1964. Manzu, a lifelong communist, won the Soviet Union’s Lenin Peace Prize in 1966. He had no formal training in art and made his first sculptures in wax from candles stolen from neighborhood churches. On Thursday in Rome of a heart attack.