Vatican Museums

This museum room – the original home of the Christian Museum, established by Benedict XIV (Lambertini, 1740-1758) with the Apostolic Letter Ad Optimarum Artium of 4 October 1757 – was built between 1756 and 1758 according to a design by the architect Paolo Posi, with the collaboration of the painter Stefano Pozzi and the sculptor Pietro Pacilli.
The walnut cabinets in the museum are the work of the mobiliers Giovanbattista Pericoli and Antonio Ravasi, and are topped with the bronze busts of twenty-four Cardinal Librarians by Luigi Valadier (1783). The material displayed inside them (first to sixth century A.D.) has recently been reorganized according to criteria of topographical and typological order: following the first window, reminiscent of the eighteenth-century display, there are exhibits from catacombs contextualized according to their cemeteries of origin; on the other side of the room there are the artefacts discovered in other late ancient Christian contexts in Rome and the Romanised world. The content of the corner and horizontal display cases is organised thematically, highlighting the typological variety of certain classes of materials in the collection (in particular, clay and bronze lamps, gilded glass, engraved glass and rock crystals).