Vatican Museums

On the occasion of the Jubilee and of the centenary of the death of Romualdo Moscioni (1849-1925), the Vatican Museums are paying homage to the master of the lens – a landscape and documentary photographer with an unmistakable style – with a photographic exhibition which, from 9 October, as part of the Museums at Work programme, will retrace the traditional “tour” of the Seven Churches of Rome, a pilgrimage documented since the seventh century. This practice became more regular after the institution of the first Jubilee, called by Pope Boniface VIII in 1300, and was definitively established in the second half of the sixteenth century, thanks to Saint Philip Neri.

Romualdo Moscioni, an expert in the use of various processes that marked the evolution of photography, is known for his vast output. The Fondo Moscioni, the most valuable part of the photographic collection preserved at the Photo Library, includes about 15,000 glass negatives acquired from his heirs in the early 1930s. They bear witness to his intense activity between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, dedicated not only to artistic documentation, but also to the city of Rome and its Basilicas.

The exhibition is divided into seven sections, each dedicated to one of the Seven Churches: Saint Peter’s, Saint Paul Outside-the-Walls, Saint Sebastian Outside-the-Walls, Saint John Lateran, Holy Cross in Jerusalem, Saint Lawrence Outside-the-Walls and Saint Mary Major. Each section presents a glass negative and a rich corpus of silver bromide gelatin photographic prints. The exhibition is completed by a large-format reproduction of Antoine Lafréry's historic engraving of The Seven Churches of Rome (1575), preserved in the Vatican Apostolic Library, and the limited-edition photographic album produced by Moscioni for the Holy Year of 1900, consisting of 36 albumen prints documenting Rome at the time.

The exhibition initiative and the catalogue published by Edizioni Musei Vaticani are curated by Paola Di Giammaria with the collaboration of Francesca Martusciello; the volume features “original historical evidence of the complex relationship between history, art, faith, architecture and archaeology in a city as complex and incomparable as Rome”.