Vatican Museums

Friday 30 September sees the inauguration of the third edition of “Collections in dialogue”, an exhibition project launched in 2018 by the Vatican Museums, in collaboration with the most important Italian and international museum institutions, with the purpose of creating valuable and reciprocal opportunities for dialogue, exchange and scientific research on the respective collections of Egyptian antiquities.
In responding to the mission that every museum is required to undertake – to narrate the past that it cares for and preserves – Room I of the Gregorian Egyptian Museum will display to the public, in an evocative setting, the most beautiful polychrome wooden sarcophagus in the Collection of Egyptian and Near Eastern Antiquities: the Sarcophagus of the priestess and chantress of Amun, Djedmut.

For a full year, until 30 September 2023, it will be Djedmut herself who will “tell her story”, and present the international and multidisciplinary scientific Vatican Coffin Project, of which she has been the key protagonist since 2008, along with other polychrome wooden sarcophaguses from the Third Intermediate Period (XXI-XXV dynasty, 1070-712 B.C.).
The project benefits from the collaboration with the Vatican Museums Cabinet of Scientific Research applied to Cultural Heritage, which coordinates the innovative protocol of diagnostic analyses conducted on these precious artefacts.

The exhibition, like the arrangement in Room I, now equipped with a new lighting system kindly offered by the company NMB Italia with the technical support of Roberto Catania S.r.l., will be the subject of a scientific conference this coming 11 October, which will be attended by the Director of the Vatican Museums, Barbara Jatta, the curator of the Department of Egyptian and Near Eastern Antiquities, Alessia Amenta, the head of the Cabinet of Scientific Research applied to the Cultural Heritage of the Vatican Museums, Professor Ulderico Santamaria, and the diagnostic assistant of the same laboratory, Fabio Morresi.
The project was made possible through the generous support of the Patrons of the Arts in the Vatican Museums – Canada Chapter.