Vatican Museums

Events. Event Wednesday 2 October: the Vatican Museums will reveal to the public the new display of the archaeological collection of the Profane Museum. To celebrate this new layout, which follows the full restoration of the room of the Museum and Valadier's cabinets, the exhibition "Precious Antiquities. The Profane Museum at the time of Pius VI" and a study day, on 16 December, dedicated to the history of the Museum and its collections.

A study of archival and inventorial sources, initiated in 2000, has enabled the various original collections and discovery contexts of the works of the Profane Museum to be traced. The more complete knowledge base thus acquired has led to the formulation of a new display layout for the collection, which was dismantled for the recent restoration of the room and of Valadier's cabinets.

The project, intended to enable a requalification and revaluation of the collections held within this museum, is based on different and more scientific criteria, involving a layout based on the reconstruction of the original collections and their provenance, alongside thematic sections for those items of unknown origin.

The display is not limited to the historic environment of the Profane Museum, but extends into areas within the Clementine Gallery to enable the arrangement of all the materials, including those hitherto relegated to storage areas.
The room of the Profane Museum will house works from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (principally those from the collection of Cardinal Gaspare Carpegna), which are fittingly displayed in Pius VI's splendid Brazil wood cabinets.

The exhibit in the Clementine Gallery is entirely new; it consists of artefacts from seventeenth and eighteenth century excavations in the Pontifical State, displayed in custom-built display cabinets (the most precious and important exemplars include: small bronzes dating from the sixth to fourth centuries B.C., from the votive deposit of Valle Fuino near Cascia; the items discovered during the reclamation of the Pontine Marshes during the pontificate of Pius VI and the ivory head and arm of a statue of chryselephantine sculpture of Athena from the age of Hadrian, from the Villa Sabina belonging to the powerful family of the Bruttii Presentes), the masterly gilded bronze horse tails unearthed during the construction of the Bridge on the Fosso della Scheggia, and thematic sections illustrating aspects of daily life, both civil and military, with imposing examples of monumental bronze works (such as a splendid head of a female divinity and a pair of magnificent winged gryphons).

A separate section of the Gallery is dedicated to the display of prized works from the collection created between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries but inspired by the antique, such as the Girometti cameos and the so-called "del Cellini" silver reliefs, with which the popes sought to compensate the grave losses incurred by the Museum during the Napoleonic occupation, along with Assyrio-Babylonian and pre-Columbian artefacts, and antiquities from Pompeii.