Vatican Museums

On Thursday 20 November, as part of the Thursdays in the Museums cultural programme, the recent restoration of the inscriptions on wall XLVII of the Lapidary Gallery, one of the most evocative architectural and exhibition spaces in the Vatican Museums, will be presented.

It houses an extraordinary collection of Latin and Greek inscriptions, embedded in the walls or placed along the route, mainly engraved on marble and travertine. Most of them were arranged by Abbot Gaetano Marini in the early nineteenth century, during the troubled papacy of Pius VII. It is a veritable “window on the past”, showing an ancient world populated by gods, devotees, places of worship, public monuments, emperors and members of the ruling class, as well as officials, military personnel, staff of the imperial palace and senatorial families, artisans, professionals, merchants and ordinary people. A variety of subjects that reflect the thematic division of the walls – fifty in total, including those on the right-hand side – according to which the collection has been organised and arranged.
Wall XLVII, in particular, together with XLV, houses the inscriptions dedicated to Dii deaeque et sacrorum ministri, or “Gods, goddesses and ministers of worship”: “sacred” epigraphs linked to worship or otherwise connected to the religious sphere, both public and private.
These inscriptions have been given not only a new lease of life in terms of conservation, but also a renewed “light” and improved legibility from a scientific point of view, thanks to a challenging restoration project. The work was directed by the Department of Epigraphic Collections and carried out by the Stone Materials Restoration Laboratory, with the collaboration of the Cabinet of Scientific Research.

The meeting will be introduced by the artistic-scientific Deputy Director Giandomenico Spinola and will feature presentations by Rosanna Barbera, curator of the Department of Epigraphic Collections, Maria Grazia Granino Cecere, former Professor at the University of Siena, and Valentina Lini and Agata Bordi, restorers of the Vatican Museums Stone Materials Restoration Workshop.

At the end of the meeting it will be possible to admire the Gallery, usually reserved to scholars, and the renewed splendour of Wall XLVII. In the following days, its secret charm will continue to be revealed to those who wish to glimpse through the eighteenth-century gate at the end of the Chiaramonti Museum.