Vatican Museums

A total of 146 works from the Vatican Museums, from one of the world’s most important collections of antiquities, for an exhibition across the ocean: EL MITO DE ROMA. Colección Museos Vaticanos will be hosted in Chile at the most representative and institutional cultural location: the Centro Cultural Palacio La Moneda from 7 November.

It is a challenging and important exhibition project, initiated in 2015 with Antonio Paolucci and taken up with enthusiasm by the new Director of the Pope’s Museums, Barbara Jatta, and involves the curatorship of Giandomenico Spinola, Director of the Vatican Museums Department of Archaeology, and the collaboration of all the archaeologists of the Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities.

The exhibition is divided into six sections, crossing a time span of more than a thousand years: from the origins of Rome (752 B.C.), to the fall of the empire (476 A.D.) and the spread of Christianity, passing through civil and military history, daily life, religion and the cult of the dead.

It is the Roman world in its entirety, rather than Rome alone, which is presented according to a structure of questions and themes intended to offer a heterogeneous framework of the civilisation that is at the base of western, and more specifically Latin culture. A legacy to which we are all indebted, in the arts, in law, in philosophy and even in our way of conceiving of daily life, both in Rome and in Santiago.

The most significant works on display until 11 March 2018 include a series of precious Attic vases, as well as some important portraits such as that of Caesar and of the emperors Augustus, Trajan, and Hadrian, the tip of the obelisk of Domitian (now in Piazza Navona), a large group with the Mithraic tauroctony, a silver ampoule with the faces of the Saints Peter and Paul, as well as numerous reliefs, statues, altars, mosaics and frescoes.