Vatican Museums

The exhibition is entitled “Jubilees. Rare Documents from the Vatican Collections” and will accompany pilgrims and visitors to the Museums throughout the entire Holy Year, starting from 5 March.
A result of a collaboration between the Vatican Museums and the Vatican Apostolic Archive, it will take place in the evocative and historic spaces adjacent to the Sistine Hall of the Vatican Apostolic Library: the Pauline Rooms, which on the occasion of the special Jubilee initiative will be exceptionally open to the public, housing an exhibition for the first time.

The Pauline Rooms include the first premises of the “new” Pontifical Archive of the Holy See, constituted by Paul V Borghese between 1610 and 1612. Formerly used as the residence of the Cardinal Librarians of the Holy Roman Church, they had remained unused after the death of Cardinal Cesare Baronio in 1607. The rooms were furnished with poplar cabinets, bearing the noble arms of the House of Borghese, and frescoed in the upper part with a cycle of historical scenes. The protagonist of almost every scene is a written document, whose preservation was ensured by the archives, an instrument of government and protection of the spiritual and territorial interests of the Roman Church.

The exhibition is intended to introduce the meaning of the Jubilee, with the invitation to live the experience of the visit from both a spiritual and an art-historical point of view, bearing witness to the importance also of the documentary “material” aspects linked to the Holy Year.
“The Apostolic Archive thus opens up to a wider public, with a precious selection of jubilee documents in normally inaccessible environments”, emphasizes Father Rocco Ronzani, Prefect of the Vatican Apostolic Archive, “confirming its role as custodian of the memory of the history of the Church and of humanity”.
Through the items on display it will be possible to rediscover and ceremony and liturgies of the Jubilee years. Prominent among these are some precious original documents from the Vatican Apostolic Archive, such as the Bulls of Indiction of the Jubilees of 1475, 1925, 1975, and 2000, as well as the most recent, signed by Pope Francis, for the indiction on 9 May 2024 of the Jubilee 2025 “Pilgrims of Hope”.

Visitors will be welcomed in the first room by the original Bull of Boniface VIII of Indiction of the First Jubilee in 1300, an important loan granted by the Vatican Apostolic Library for a limited period. Along the exhibition route it will be possible to admire a rich showcase of the Vatican Museums (Department of Decorative Arts) with more than thirty objects, symbolic of past Jubilees, and others that indirectly bear witness to minor aspects of the life of pilgrims on their way to the Roman basilicas. The attention of most visitors is attracted by the mason's everyday tools, such as bricks, hammers or trowels, which became symbols of the opening and closing of the holy doors and which were only later created by famous goldsmiths and silversmiths to designs by great artists. Particularly beautiful are those made in silver, ivory, pearls and precious stones for Pius XI, on the occasion of the 1925 Jubilee, by Pio Cellini, based on a design by Biagio Biagetti, then Artistic Director of the Vatican Museums, who set up a small gold forge in his office, inside the Hall of Blessings.
The polychrome marble sign - also chosen as the symbolic image of the exhibition – instead dates back to the 17^th century Jubilee. Affixed to the Holy Door at the moment of closing, it indicated the place where the box with the keys and medals of the Pope was placed.
Among the objects on display that still inspire curiosity among scholars today is the “pilgrim's staff”: a bamboo work that has intrigued several scholars and probably dates back to the mid-17th century. Scenes from the Old and New Testaments, the coat of arms of Pope Innocent X and a representation of Saint Peter's Basilica taken from an engraving by Greuter are painted on the surface with a thin stroke of black ink. Chronicles of the time tell of aristocratic men belonging to brotherhoods from northern Italy and central Europe entering Rome holding sticks painted with a complex decorative cycle.