Vatican Museums

With the presentation, on Tuesday 13 November, of the volume “Raphael in Rome. Style, technique, conservation”, the Vatican Museums will anticipate the celebrations with which, in 2020, the great master from Urbino will be commemorated, 500 years after his death.
Published by Edizioni Musei Vaticani, and edited by Antonio Paolucci, Barbara Agosti and Silvia Ginzburg, the book brings together contributions from the study days in Rome in June 2014 to important new findings from the research and restorations conducted recently on the works produced by Raphael in the years between his arrival in Rome in 1508 and his death in 1520.

Available in Italian and English, the book describes Raphael’s artistic journey in the last decade of his life and underlines important fundamental aspects of it, such as technical choices and experimentation, stylistic consistency and expressive innovations.
The themes considered include the management and use of his workshop, the evolution of Raphaelesque technique in the Vatican Rooms, the restoration of the paintings in Capodimonte and the Prado, as well as the study of his executive technique.
The extensive photographic accompaniment in colour, contained in a substantial “atlas”, offers splendid reproductions of Sanzio’s works, with previously unpublished full page details and comparative images, as well as images produced by x-ray and reflectography, preparatory drawings and cartoons.

The meeting will be introduced, as usual, by the Director of the Vatican Museums Barbara Jatta, and will be moderated by Guido Cornini, Director of the Department of Arts, who will then leave the floor to Andrea Zezza, of the Università degli Studi della Campania “Luigi Vanvitelli”, and Gianluigi Colalucci, former chief restorer of the Vatican Museums Painting and Wood Materials Restoration Laboratory.