Vatican Museums

The Vatican Museums and the French Academy in Rome – Villa Medici are dedicating a study meeting to the art of formatura or moulding, the ancient tradition of making casts of sculptural works of art, mainly for educational purposes.
The opportunity is provided by the entry into the Villa Medici collections of a cast of the Sarcophagus of Jonah, the pride of the Pius-Christian Museum in the Vatican Museums, recently exhibited at Villa Medici in the exhibition on Shared Sacred Places.

During the months of the exhibition, a cast specially commissioned by the French Academy and made by the Vatican Museums' Stone Materials Restoration Laboratory replaced the original in the Pius-Christian Museum, awaiting its transfer to the Villa’s collections at the end of the exhibition.
The link between this masterpiece of early Christian art and Villa Medici is not coincidental: it was from that site, in fact, that the Sarcophagus of Jonah was acquired for the Vatican collections in 1757, first exhibited on the walls of the Sacred Museum of Benedict XIV, then, after almost a century, in the Pius-Christian Museum in the Lateran (1854), before returning to the Vatican in 1963, in the new building specially constructed behind the Pinacoteca at the behest of John XXIII and Paul VI.

The meeting on 11 March will enable everyone to discover the fascinating history of this splendid work of early Christianity, rediscovered at the end of the sixteenth century in the large construction site of the new Vatican Basilica and then preserved in the gardens of Villa Medici for almost two centuries.
After institutional greetings from the two directors – Barbara Jatta for the Vatican Museums, and Sam Stourdzé for the French Academy – the meeting will be introduced by Alessandro Gallicchio, Director of the Academy’s art history department. The speakers will include Umberto Utro, from the Vatican Museums, who will highlight the importance of the sarcophagus in the origins of Christian art; Alessandro Vella, from the Pontifical Institute of Christian Archaeology, who will recount the epic story of the sarcophagus and its fascinating history as a collector's item; Valentina Lini, restorer at the Vatican Museums’ Stone Materials Laboratory, will then explain the restoration work carried out on the sarcophagus, from the eighteenth-century integrative intervention to the most recent conservation work carried out in the Vatican Laboratory; and finally, Andrea Felice, deputy head restorer at the Laboratory, will explain in detail how the new cast for Villa Medici was created, in keeping with the great tradition of the art of moulding.
The meeting will be held in the Grand Salon of Villa Medici, in the presence of the cast which will be admired by all before being moved to the plaster cast gallery of Villa Medici, one of the most important collections of artistic casts in Rome, which includes a seventeenth-century series of copies of the reliefs of Trajan’s Column. A few days after the meeting, all visitors to the Villa will be able to admire it there, and be invited to rediscover the original among the treasures of ancient Christian art preserved in our Museums.