Vatican Museums

In the approach to the opening of the Holy Year, and on the occasion of the forthcoming Christmas festivities, the Directorate of the Museums and Cultural Heritage is promoting, together with the Directorate of the Pontifical Villas, a new exhibition project that from 5 December will feature some precious masterpieces from the Pope's Museums exceptionally on display in the Papal Palace of Castel Gandolfo.
Raphael Sanzio’s tapestry, Stoning of Saint Stephen, together with the painting by Domenico Bigordi known as Ghirlandaio, Adoration of the Child, accompanied by another four Nativities by 15^th-century Masters, will temporarily leave their usual location in the Vatican Picture Gallery, to be admired also by the public who will flock to the town in the Castelli Romani to visit the new papal Museum Complex for the great Jubilee event.

Along the exhibition route, the first to welcome the faithful and visitors will be the exhibition set up in the Hall of Popes “The Stoning of St. Stephen. A tapestry by Raphael for the Sistine Chapel” curated by Alessandra Rodolfo, Director of the Tapestries and Textiles Department of the Vatican Museums. The exhibition of the precious textile artefact made of wool, silk and gold and silver threads (Flemish manufacture), belonging to the series of tapestries of the Acts of the Apostles, is intended as a tribute to the genius of the Urbino painter, who created the preparatory cartoons on commission from Pope Leo X so that they could further embellish the Sistine Chapel on the occasion of solemn ceremonies. Memorable was in 2020 the reconstruction in the Sistine Chapel, for just seven days in 2020, of the grandiose display of tapestries designed by the “divin pittore”, on the occasion of the Raphael Celebrations of that year, was a memorable occasion.
“Nativity. Ghirlandaio and other 15th-century Masters” is the title of the other exhibition that, in the same period – and for more than a quarter of a year – will enrich the new museum spaces on the lower floor of the Papal Palace with ideas and suggestions. Curated by Fabrizio Biferali, Director of the Department of XV-XVI Century Art, the exhibition will take the Nativity as its thematic focus, represented first and foremost by Ghirlandaio's masterpiece Adoration of the Child: a precious and refined panel of small dimensions (45x42 cm), executed in tempera and gold by the Florentine painter around 1492 for a cabinet that was already dismantled in the sacristy of Pisa Cathedral and perhaps intended to contain relics, in accordance with a typology that can be found dating back to the mid-fifteenth century in Beato Angelico’s Cabinet Storing Silver.
Also on display, together with the work by Ghirlandaio, are four other splendid Nativities painted in tempera on wood in the mid-fifteenth century: one by the Florentine Zanobi Strozzi (1412-1468); the Adorations of the Child by Giovanni di Paolo (c. 1400 - 1482) and Sano di Pietro (1406-1481); and the Adoration of the Magi by the painter Ludovico Urbani, from the Marches region, restored to its former chromatic splendour thanks to the restoration carried out in 2022 at the Vatican Museums’ Painting and Wooden Materials Restoration Laboratory, with the generous support of the New York Chapter of the Patrons of the Arts in the Vatican Museums.

Access to all the current exhibitions (including “Castel Gandolfo 1944”) is included in the entrance ticket to the Papal Palace of Castel Gandolfo (which may be visited, with a guide or independently, together with the Garden of the Moor and the Secret Garden).