The Vatican Museums ~ 9 Miles Of Galleries Containing Some Of The Most Famous Artworks Ever Created

Written by Constantine Mauro Sunday, 08 April 2012 21:33

The Vatican Museums boast one of the world's greatest art collections, they are a gigantic repository of treasures from antiquity and the Renaissance, all housed in a labyrinthine series of lavishly adorned palaces, apartments, and galleries (9 miles long) leading to the Sistine Chapel. The Vatican Museums occupy a part of the papal palaces in the Vatican City enclave in Rome, built from the 1200s onward. From the former papal private apartments, the museums were created over a period of time to display the vast treasure trove of art acquired by the Vatican. The Vatican Museums trace their origins to one marble sculpture, purchased more than 500 years ago. The sculpture of ‘Laocoön’, the priest who, according to Greek mythology, tried to convince the people of ancient Troy not to accept the Greeks' "gift" of a hollow horse, was discovered 14 January 1506, in a vineyard near the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome. Pope Julius II sent Giuliano da Sangallo and Michelangelo Buonarroti, who were working at the Vatican, to examine the discovery. On their recommendation, the pope immediately purchased the sculpture from the vineyard owner. The pope put the sculpture of Laocoön and his sons in the grips of a sea serpent on public display at the Vatican exactly one month after its discovery. Since then, the museums have grown and expanded, and now consist of a number of different buildings within the Vatican Enclave, including the Gregorian Egyptian Museum, Gregorian Etruscan Museum, the Pio-Clementine Museum, the Chiaramonti Museum, the Braccio Nuovo (New Wing), Gregorian Profane Museum, Pio Christian Museum (with the Christian and Hebrew Lapidary), Pinacoteca (picture gallery), Missionary-Ethnological Museum, Sacred Museum (formerly part of the Vatican Library), Vatican Historical Museum (Lateran Apostolic Palace) along with displays of tapestries, ceramics, miniature mosaics, and classical and modern religious arts in the Vatican Palaces and Chapels that are also open to the public. There are 54 galleries, or "salas" in total, with the famous Sistine Chapel, notably, being the very last sala within the Museum. Other highlights include paintings by Fra Angelico, Benozzo Gozzoli and Filippo Lippi in Room III; three of Raphael's most famous paintings (Coronation of the Virgin, 1503; Madonna of Foligno, 1511; Transfiguration, 1520) in Room III; a remarkable portrait of St. Jerome by Leonardo da Vinci (1480) in Room IX; Caravaggio's dramatic Descent from the Cross (1608) in Room XII; and Bernini's clay models in Room XVII. A Workshop for Restoring paintings, bronzes, marble, tapestries and other items, is part of the Museums, which also include a Scientific Research Laboratory. The Vatican Library is one of the oldest in the world and contains over 75,000 codices. The museums include restaurants and cafes, museum shops and even the Vatican post office. Over 4 and a half million visitors annually enjoy the Vatican Museums collections and facilities. Visit the museum’s website at … http://mv.vatican.va/3_EN/pages/MV_Home.html

The Vatican Museums collection is displayed throughout the different salas, which are laid out in the separate, but connected buildings. The Museo Pio-Clementino contains the Greek Cross Gallery (Sala a Croce Greca) with the porphyri sarcophagi of Constance and Saint Helen, daughter and mother of Constantine the Great. The Sala Rotonda, shaped like a miniature Pantheon, contains impressive ancient mosaics on the floors, and ancient statues lining the perimeter, including a gilded bronze statue of Hercules. The Gallery of the Statues (Galleria delle Statue), which as its name implies, holds various important statues, including ‘Sleeping Ariadne’ and the bust of ‘Menander’, it also contains the ‘Barberini Candelabra’. The Gallery of the Busts (Galleria dei Busti), contains an impressive collection of Roman busts, while the Cabinet of the Masks (Gabinetto delle Maschere) is named from the mosaic on the floor of the gallery, found in Villa Adriana, which shows ancient theater masks. Along the walls, several famous statues are shown including the ‘Three Graces’. The Sala delle Muse houses the statue group of Apollo and the nine muses as well as statues by important ancient Greek sculptors and the Sala degli Animali is named for the many ancient animal statues it contains. The Museo Chiaramonti is named after Pope Pius VII, who founded it in the early 19th century. The museum consists of a large arched gallery inside which are exhibited statues, sarcophaguses and friezes. The New Wing (“Braccio Nuovo”) built by Raphael Stern, houses important statues like ‘The Prima Porta Augustus’ (which created some controversy in 2008 when the Vatican museum created a copy and painted it as research had indicated the original probably looked – art historian Fabio Barry described the results as looking “like a cross-dresser trying to hail a taxi") and John L. Stoddard's 'Old Father Nile',(sometimes called “Colossus of the Nile” ). Also in the Chiaramonti museum it the Galeria Lapidaria with more than 3,000 stone tablets and inscriptions, the world's greatest collection of its kind (generally not open to the public). The Museo Gregoriano Etrusco, founded by Pope Gregory XIII in 1836, has eight galleries housing important Etruscan pieces from archaeological excavations. The pieces include: vases, sarcophagus, bronzes and the ‘Guglielmi Collection’. The Museo Egiziano, founded by Pope Gregory XVI, houses a grand collection of Ancient Egyptian material including papyruses, the ‘Grassi Collection’, animal mummies, and the famous ‘Book of the Dead’. Amongst the other highlights spread across the various salas paintings by Caravaggio including the majestic ‘Entombment’, Leonardo da Vinci's portrait of ‘St. Jerome in the Wilderness’, works by painters Fra Angelico, Giotto, Raphael, Nicolas Poussin and Titian, the red marble papal throne, formerly in the Basilica di San Giovanni in Laterano, the Raphael Rooms with many works by Raphael and his workshop, including the masterpieces “The School of Athens” and "The Transfiguration", more modern works by van Gogh, Salvador Dali, Pablo Picasso, Paul Gauguin, Renato Guttuso, Marc Chagall, Henry Moore, Wassily Kandinsky and others, the Gallery of Maps (topographical maps of the whole of Italy, painted on the walls by friar Ignazio Danti of Perugia, commissioned by Pope Gregory XIII), the world's largest pictorial geographical study, the frescoes and other works in the Borgia Apartment (built for Pope Alexander VI), and of course, the Niccoline and Sistene chapels.

The Vatican Museums program of temporary exhibitions currently includes “Rituals of Life: The Spirituality and Culture of Aboriginal Australians” which will be on display throughout 2011. Inspired by the canonization of Australia’s only Saint, Mary Mackillop in 2010, "Rituals of Life" is a journey through the spirituality and culture of the Aboriginal people of Australia using pieces from the collection in the Ethnological Museum of the Vatican Museums. In the lead-up to the exhibition, Fr. Nicola Mapelli with Katherine Aigner; a representative of the National Museum of Australia who researched the collection, travelled extensively to Aboriginal communities, mainly in Western Australia and the Tiwi Islands to reconnect with the descendents of the Aboriginal people who sent their works to the Vatican almost a century ago as a gift to Pope Pious XI. On this journey of reconnection, Fr. Mapelli met ancestors of the artists who were very happy to see him and expressed their pride that these works of art were now cultural ambassadors at the Vatican Museums. The exhibition was inspired by the desire to honor Indigenous Australian Art, as being one of the oldest artistic expressions on our planet. These expressions embrace daily life in all its manifestations. The centrality of the indigenous art is strongly connected to their spirituality, and the heart of this spirituality is expressed through what is called The Dreamtime. The meaning of Dreamtime is complex. Dreamtime is used to describe a belief, a religion and a law. It is identified as a past moment in which the first ancestors began a journey around the world, creating all the features of the world itself. The spirits of these ancestral beings live on today, under the form of eternal forces, which are visible in every single manifestation of nature. This explains the strong spiritual bond between this population and the land of their birth, which they therefore consider sacred. The works of art on display, selected from the vast Vatican collection, range from the simple objects used in daily life to ceremonial decorations, from musical instruments to the spears used during hunting, from painting on portable stones to containers made of decorated egg shells all of which have in common a bond with the religious, spiritual and supernatural dimension. “The Way of the Sea” is a collection of sixty model vessels from all parts of the world displayed along the Helicoidal Ramp (the first time this exhibition area has been used). The models are displayed alongside black and white photographs taken by Catholic missionaries at the beginning of the twentieth century.