Could a mad fantasy finally be fulfilled? When the artist Anselm Kiefer was a child, he tells me, his greatest ambition was to become the pope. “I wanted to have always perfection,” he says. He had been brought up as a Catholic. He had served as an altar boy. He knew the mass in Latin. “And the pope seemed to me the very highest thing you could be.”
Later, convinced by his parents that this particular dream was impossible — “a German had never been pope, they told me” — he changed his aim. He swapped pontiff for painter. But it was only the focus of his ambitions that had shifted, not their scale. “I am the greatest painter, and there’s no doubt,” his youthful
