Vatican Museums

On Thursday 25 October at 06.00 p.m. in the Paul VI Hall, Vatican City, there will be an official presentation of the documentary film "ART AND FAITH. Via Pulchritudinis", in the presence of His Holiness Benedict XVI.
The work, a multilingual production by Edizioni Musei Vaticani, was made by the Polish television company TBA for the Governorate of Vatican City State, Direction of the Vatican Museums, and produced by the Ambassador of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, Przemyslaw Jan Häuser.

The special preview screening, to be attended by the Synod Fathers convened in Rome for the XIII Ordinary General Assembly, forms part of a richer and more varied celebratory context: the Year of Faith, the fiftieth anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council (1962) and the 500^th "birthday" of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, unveiled and presented by Michelangelo to Pope Julius II della Rovere on 31 October 1512.

In the realisation of this film, or rather this tour of Christian-inspired beauty among the papal collections and the pictorial masterpieces of the Sistine Chapel, the Governorate of Vatican City State, through the Direction of the Vatican Museums responsible for the project, subject and script, has sought to express the words of the Pontiff who, defining the Museums as "a concentrate of theology in images", underlined their cultural and spiritual mission: "The Museum truly shows the continuous interweaving of Christianity and culture, faith and art, divine and human".

Since pursuing the "via Pulchritudinis", the path of Beauty, may lead one to cross the threshold of faith, and in order that this itinerary might not remain the privilege of the few, it is important that these images, along with the human narrative accompanying them, reach the widest public and the most diverse audience possible.

The DVD, which masterfully condenses 2000 years of the history of the Church and art into an evocative 70 minute account in images, will be distributed worldwide from November in its multilingual version (Italian, Polish, English, Spanish, French, German, Japanese, Russian, Portuguese and Chinese), and will be available at a purchase price of € 9.90.