Alla Scoperta dei Musei Vaticani (2015): Season 1, Episode 3 - L'armonia dell'arte - full transcript
The third step of our journey
in the Vatican Museums
starts from here:
from the Octagonal Court,
so called
for its shape with eight sides.
We are surronded by statues,
masterpieces
of the classical period,
as the Belvedere Apollo
but also the representation of
the Tigri River
which looks like an old men
with a full beard.
and many other marble masterpieces.
Why had popes collected
in the past time
pagan artworks of pagan dieties?
The answer is obviuos:
all this happened during the Renaissance.
In that period arouse
a new interest
in the Classical world
and its masterpieces.
Popes shared a passion for
antiquities as well,
above all Pope Julius II.
When the marble group of the Laoocon
was located here,
the Vatican Museums didn't exist
yet.
Here there was a big garden,
a square courtyard
designed by Bramante,
and it took
250 years to transform it
in its current octagonal shape,
and above all, that popes'
private collections
could become public,
a place open to visitors.
For people coming in the Vatican Museums
one of the most moving experiences
is exactly this place:
the Octagonal Court.
We are under the sky of Rome
VATICAN MUSEUMS DIRECTOR
and all around there are masterpieces
of ancient statuary.
Looking at these statues,
we understand how much
our civilization has been
influenced by the Classical culture.
On 14th January 1506,
the pope got to know that
VATICAN MUSEUMS MODERN ART
DEPARTMENT
an important finding
was come to light,
a magnificent sculpture
on Oppio Hill.
That statue was in a hole
in which the owner of the vineyard
had fallen in.
Pope Julius II called
his architect
Giuliano da Sangallo, asking him
to give a look at it.
They both decided to go to
to Oppio Hill on horseback.
It was a courtyard with
large niches
in which statues were exposed.
A simple setting
with orange trees
TOPOGRAPHY OF ITALY
ANTICA UNIVERSITA' DI FIRENZE
and gushing fountains
in the centre.
It was a quite idyllic place
with decorative elements,
which in the early years
were referred to Aeneid
characters.
VATICAN MUSEUMS - GREEK AND ROMAN ANTIQUITY
DEPARTMENT
The Pope was a warrior but above all,
an enlightened man and he used
the myth as a means to
dialogue with
cultured people of the time:
they were rulers, ambassadors,
who were not only
religious, or Catholics.
Since its origins, the Church
had considered itself as
the heir of the Roman civilization:
from the Imperium of Augusto
and of Traiano
to the Imperium "Sine fine"
of the Roman-catholic Church,
this was the ideal and
the project of popes.
In this sense, the
Vatican Museums
are the fulfillment
of this ideal,
and they host masterpieces
of Greek-Roman statuary.
This marble group
ART HISTORIAN
influenced very much the
artistic culture of the sixteenth century
and all that came later:
the seventeenth,
the eighteenth,
the nineteenth century, and so on.
Even nowadays, perhaps,
it can be considered
a sculptural-pictorial model
for contemporary artists.
There have been many replicas
of the Laocoon
or artworks inspired to it,
even cartoons of newspapers.
When the Laocoon was found, it was
missing of some parts: the priest's
right arm and the son's right
arm as well;
then a controversy arose,
also quite complex,
on how to rebuild it.
The restores had seen
from the beginning, how the
the deltoid was positioned
and that the arm could be
probably bent.
Laocoon had to die
because Troy fell,
Troy had to fall
so that Enea could leave
and lay the foundations of
Rome, with his successors.
The marble drama is composed
by the younger son, who is dead,
Laocoon, suffering
the wound inflicted by the serpent,
and the eldest son
who is trying to run away.
So, there are three sequences
of a drama: three frames
in a unit, as in a tragic film.
The Apollo Belvedere,
the most beautiful man in the world,
the most beautiful sculpture
in the world;
so Winckelmann wrote of it.
Antonio Canova considered it
the supreme model
of statuary art.
We are here now,
in a very particular place:
it's the square vestibule
that leads to the famous
Pio-Clementino Museum,
but if you come this way,
beyond this marble basin,
there's a very famous place.
Few know that here
Leonardo da Vinci worked,
and this let you understand how Rome
was a place that attracted
the greatest artists in the art history,
and in this place there is,
not by chance,
a masterpiece: the
Apoxyomenos statue,
the athlete who washes himself.
It is a Greek athlete,
who after a race and
his effort, washes himself.
Athletes, before the race, sprinkled
oil on their body, and after the race
they put on
fine sand. Finally they took
away everything with
a tool called "Strigil",
a kind of curved spoon,
with which they even rubbed their skin.
Here the athlete is
scraping sweat and dust from his body
with an outstretched arm:
it's right this movement
that makes this statue unique.
Actually this is an "excellent copy".
The original statue was
made by Lysippos,
a famous bronze worker and
Greek sculptor in 320 BC.
The Romans saw this sculpture
and they immediately understood
that it was a masterpiece,
and then they brought it to Rome,
when they invaded Greece.
In Rome, they put
the statue
in the Baths of Agrippa
and it remained there.
Think that an emperor,
Tiberius, fell in love with it
to the point
he wanted it inside his palace,
but then, by popular acclaim,
it was put again in the hot springs.
Now, the Greek original is gone,
and nobody knows what happened to it.
This marble
Roman reproduction was found
among the ruins of an Imperial
Palace in Trastevere
in the mid-nineteenth century.
Thanks to the Roman artists'
ability
to reproduce artworks,
now we know
that Lysippos had made
an extraordinary masterpiece,
which is here,
in its right place.
The Piuo-Clementino Museum
takes its name
from the two popes
who realized it.
We should overthrow
their name order
CULTURE AND CHRISTIANITY
PONTIFICIA UNIVERSITA' LATERANENSE
first Clemente XIV
and then Pius VI.
Clement XIV reigned
for a few years, for six years.
The Franciscan Pope
achieved this museum
dedicated to Greek
and Roman art.
The Piuo-Clementino Museum was born
especially to host
the artworks brought to light
from excavations,
and excavations were many in those years.
Besides the Museum hosts
many artworks of private collections,
because the important Roman
families had in their villas
or in their palaces and gardens
an impressive amount
of ancient sculpures.
The new museum had a purpose,
and it was the first time that
an architect had to face a specific theme:
to build a new museum, a work
never done before, therefore
he had to create it.
The architectural intervention
by Simonetti
VATICAN MUSEUMS - CHRISTIAN ANTIQUITY
DEPARTMENT
was aimed to create new
speficic spaces
inspired to the Classical-Roman
architecture,
in accordance with the neoclassical style,
where sculptures could
live again,
exactly how they were
in the ancient Rome.
Following an analogy process,
as if to say,
VATICAN MUSEUMS,
SUPERINTENDENCE UNIT
the architect conceived an antique
space for ancient sculptures.
Not only it was built using
the model of the Pantheon
for the Round room,
the health spa rooms for the other rooms,
but also ancient mosaics from excavation
or purchased were used for the floor.
The ancient mosaics were detached,
lifted with sabers
and then they were reassembled
in the eighteenth-century context.
There was a "virtual" antiquity:
entering a room,
with marble columns
and ancient capitals which had
been reused
and ancient floor
with mosaics...
one had the impression of
entering a Roman building
with its statues.
So that was really something new,
a new concept for a new museum,
an extremely bold and
brilliant idea.
Masterpieces like those you see
on my right and on my left
are just suitable for
a sumptuous floor
in polychrome marble
like this one.
And the frescoes you see
are the perfect frame
that enhances and honors
these ancient masterpieces.
This is beautifil, isn't it?
What could we ask more?
The Round Hall is the one
that hosts
sculptures of
greater dimensions,
the most important ones
of the collection.
Certainly it was hit
by lightning, therefore it was sacred.
It was inviolable
and untouchable, buried
in the palace court. It came
to light in the second half
of the nineteenth century.
If we watch Hercules at a side,
It has a massive triangular face
where the neck
is even bigger than his head;
however, if you turn on the opposite side,
you see a figure with
a beautiful face.
This means that there were
optical corrections,
and even, at that time,
this artwork was observed from that
position.
The view is always privileged,
it is never a one-way view,
who decides it.
We are in a special place
of the Vatican Museums,
the so-called
Gallery of Statues.
It's an open loggia
on the landscape of Rome
full of ancient Roman sculptures
representing heroes
and deities of the Classical
world: Phoebus-Apollo,
Aesculapius, the Niobe,
Minerva, and all
Olympian deities.
At the end of this room
there is also Ariadne,
in tears, abandoned on
the Nessus island.
We're in the fable, in the myth
and it is singular that
this is happening
in a museum which is also
the testimony of the Christian Doctrine.
Indeed the
Museum is the most eminent place,
which convey, through images
and art, the religious
ideals of the Catholic Church.
In the Pio-Clementino Museum,
there is a room
dedicated to animals,
both ancient and carved
ex-novo in the eighteenth century,
they are also an artistic
expression of an ethological
interest: they were not
figurines
but were represented in action
while they were running away,
hunting or eating or
something else.
Many of them are exotic animals
and the people coming in this
room
could see animals they had never
seen in their all life.
The Meleagro is a
beautiful Roman replica
of an original by Skopas.
It's interesting
because these copies
were reinterpreted by copyists,
which in this case
had put a fluttering blanket,
the head of the boar,
the dog near the Greek hero.
The originality of art
always implies a sort
of "patricide",
we could say that it is necessary
to distance from the
predecessors
in order to find something really new,
a truly novelty.
In the past, there was this character
of originality
which was often reinterpreted
in a series of reproduction.
The reproduction was usually
made by a "copyst",
a sculptor who desired to
put his personal touch in his artwork.
Franzoni is a very skilled
craftsman
with a neoclassical culture and
an extraordinary technical ability,
so that the same Canova
admired him very much.
Franzoni's main artistic feature
is his capability
to express the pathos
of the scene,
so the horse has
his mouth wide open,
the lion is engaged
angrily in biting it;
and then these animals
are almost expressing human feelings.
He had a simply piece
of a horse:
the right one, and a small piece
of the chariot,
and everything was
recreated by him
in a dynamic and vibrant
composition
so much so that this room
was dedicated
to his artwork: "the Biga".
This marble chariot
is surrounded by statues
representing figures of athletic
competitions and circus games.
The purpose is not a philological
interpretation, but to recreate
in this room the cultural
atmosphere of the classical
period.
In the eighteenth century,
especially in Rome,
there was a restoration school,
which had some philology purposes:
the restoration was meant to
query the significance of artwork,
its composition, its gesture,
so that to understand it
and make it clear
to the public. But the restoration
was, let's say, "casual".
If a statue was missing its head
they took another one,
which could typological
and aesthetically fit.
It was important to see
the artwork in its entirety,
in this way its sale price
could be altered
even with controversial
operations.
Sometimes they recreated subjects
non-existent,
other times, from high-relief
they took away
the full-relief figures
which were sold
at higher prices.
A relief that cost 400 ecus
was sold in four
different elements
each of one costed 500 ecus.
They were a little bit like "magicians",
they were good,
but also very smart.
The neoclassical bust has
always made us think about
a White, immaculate,
pure white antiquity,
which in fact it has never existed.
Statues, temples, streets
were all colored, even
very bright colors.
In this period arises
the idea of
the white sculpture, not colorful,
not chromatic, as well as the idea
of a monochromatic architecture.
We will find out that
things weren't how we believed,
that the architectures were
totally painted
and sculptures were
completely plastered and painted,
even those in bronze;
indeed they gave an impression
of vividness.
A white statue was a bad
statue for the ancients.
The colorful cast is very ugly,
but we do not know how
the artist of the time
used the colors: the substances
for the coloring,
the amount of color,
and how much it was diluted.
Augustus has a bright red cloak,
because the purple cloak
was the most visible sign
of the Supreme Commander,
the Emperor.
The Augustus of Prima Porta
is one of the most famous
statues in the Vatican Museums.
It was found at Prima Porta,
the villa of the Empress Livia.
It is a statue
particularly well preserved,
and it is of an artistic high level:
Obviously the Empress
could afford a top artist.
This complex scene,
can be understood much better
if we see it with its color,
as I have tried here to present it.
It is a statue which deals with
the need
to communicate to people.
At that time, there were no means of
mass communication,
there were no newspapers,
radio, television.
It only existed art, sculpture,
architecture
and then all that had to be readable,
in a clear, almost advertising way.
The Vatican Museums are full of
Exempla, i.e. models.
In those centuries, people were coming
to Rome
to visit The Pope's museum,
not only to see Michelangelo,
but, above all, to see some works
of the classical antiquity,
which were considered
fundamental models,
as well as for the modern art.
One of these classical model was the
Belvedere Torso, but there were others.
The Belvedere Torso was in the house
of the most important Roman sculptor
of the end of the 1400, Andrea Bregno.
It is perhaps this sculpture which
allows us
to understand the "mechanical"
human movement.
We are now here
in the Chiaramonti Museum,
consisting of this long space
with many faces that look at you.
They are faces from the antiquity,
mainly from the Roman times.
These are the faces that you would have
met in the streets;
moreover, these statues
were colored:
you could see the color of the eyes,
the color of hair.
It is a unique place,
that allows you
to make a journey in the
society and even in the belief
of the ancient Rome.
But how was this place born?
Well, it is a troubled story.
When Napoleon arrived here,
the Vatican museums were looted.
A pope was deported to France and
he died there.
The successor, Pius VII,
who wanted this museum,
was also arrested.
And most of the masterpieces
of the Vatican Museums
were looted
and brought to France.
At the end of the Napoleonic era,
with the defeat of Waterloo,
France had returned
the looted property
not only to Italy but
also to other nations;
Canova was commissioned to
go to France and
recover all the masterpieces.
Canova was already General
Inspector of the Vatican Museums.
At that time Pius VII decided
to achieve this Museum
with the pieces that were in part
returned from the Louvre,
and many other acquisitions
made in antique shops,
coming from archaeological excavations.
It is the early nineteenth century,
and that's why today we have an
incredible collection of statues.
They are true masterpieces
and Canova was commissioned
to make this Museum by Pius VII,
and he did it by marrying
the Three Sisters of Arts
that is: sculpture, painting
and architecture.
The sculpture, as you see, is
all around us,
but the architecture is
in the form of shelves, all of them
very elaborate, different one each other.
And finally the painting is
right up there, in the lunettes
some of which describe
the birth of this museum,
that still fascinates
all visitors
for this encounter
with all aspects of the past.
Many of the Roman portraits
we have
were common characters,
surely belonging
to upper class, as there was
a cost to be paid:
a private could hardly effort
more than one portrait.
This fact leads us to think
that the portraits
are referring to a famous political
figure, possibly an emperor.
Even today when we go
in a public office
we see the portrait of
our President hung on the wall
and it is a portrait printed
in thousands of copies.
The Romans used the portrait
which could be, at times,
also very realistic
while the bodies, instead,
were very idealized.
Therefore there was a contrast
between the body and the face, the head.
The pose of the Emperor
is an extremely solemn pose
referring to a very famous model:
Jupiter Optimus Maximus, the statue
that was in the Capitoline Temple,
on top of the Campidoglio.
This reference to that model
wasn't intended to
equate the emperor to a divinity
because in the Roman Occident
it wouldn't have been tolerated,
but it was more than an analogy.
The Emperor dominated
the earthly world
exactly like Jupiter
dominated Gods,
so it was a form of parallelism.
There was a whole very subtle game
of references, quotations, allusions,
that, in modern times,
we could recognize
in the political propaganda
or advertising based
on the associations of images,
quotes and subliminal referrals
to popular iconography
which are part of
the collective consciousness.
It's an extremely interesting
sculptural text:
the term means
"She who advances":
it is a nymph, but the notoriety,
the fame of this sculpture
depends on a Freud's journey
in Rome,
around 1907, when he saw it,
he conceived his way of thinking,
a reasoning
on that subject and its condition,
about pathological condition.
Compared to the Pio-Clementino
Museum, the museography of
the Museum of the eighteenth century
is almost
revolutionary.
It is a very spartan museum:
it hasn't fine marbles,
the floor was in cotto tiles,
and now it is a twentieth-century floor.
The Cardinals chose this
Benedictine monk
who will be an
enemy of Napoleon.
and was even taken prisoner
by Napoleon.
There was a period, a few years,
when Rome was ruled directly
by French officials.
There is the famous anecdote
referred to the Secretary of State,
the Cardinal Ercole Consalvi,
to whom Napoleon said:
"I will destroy your Church",
and the Secretary of State answered:
"Dear Napoleon, we, priests,
did not succeed it in 1800 years,
do you think to succeed it?"
Among these statues, there were: the
the Laocoon, the Apollo Belvedere,
the great painting
the Transfiguration by Raffaello,
that is all the extraordinary masterpieces
of the art history.
Antonio Canova tried and succeeded
to bring back
more than half of these artworks,
at their original home.
These artworks are the perfect
expression of the Neoclassicism:
Perseus with Medusa is even
the alter ego of the Apollo Belvedere.
Pius VII wanted to renew the Museum
with artworks of the highest importance,
as well as Canova, who
artistically
defied the Classical world:
it was the Neoclassical era
and then there was
a challenge between the artist
and its original classic models.
When he was keeping
the Perseus in his atelier
he exposed it in front of
the Apollo's mold,
it was clear the deep connection
between the two models.
The Boxers were found
near Pausania
where Kreugas and Damoxenos
were fighting
in a so violent manner
that one with his hand pierced
the other's belly
tearing away his guts.
We are now in a place
which is not open to visitors:
it's the Lapidary Gallery.
All around there are
more than 3600 inscriptions,
some of them were public, others
reported the legionaries name,
sometimes they reported
more intimate, private inscriptions.
Look, here it is
represented a family,
we can read "amor", "love"
a feeling that
re-emerges after centuries.
Actually, these are not only
pages of stone,
they are descriptions of daily lives
or public events,
as well as, most oo the times,
people's sufferings.
Here is the death of Octavia,
who died four years,
nine months, four days old.
Sometimes there are even
the number of hours.
Around you there is
a veritable archive
of people and emotions.
But there are also other
historical artifacts,
as this beam,
which was positioned here;
there are two of them:
it is exactly a "baglio",
a beam which practically
was used
to join the two sides of a ship
and above that beam, it could be put
the bridge of the ship.
In fact these beams are the "bagli" of
the famous Caligula's ships.
Caligula was an extravagant
Emperor,
at times, even cruel.
He built two gigantic ships,
immense, on the Lake of Nemi,
which even housed a palace
and a Temple,
in practice they were a
Floating residence.
When he died these ships
were abandoned,
sunk or sunk on their own,
and all remained there until
the fifteenth century,
when few pieces were found
and now they are exposed here,
in the Vatican Museums.
Here, we can see the feelings,
let's say, of the ordinary people
and also the
madness of an emperor.
The Lapidary Gallery was set up
between 1805 and 1808,
by Gaetano Marini, the prefect of
the Vatican Library, at that time.
VATICAN MUSEUMS - EPIGRAPHY COLLECTION
DEPARTMENT
In the Vatican there was an
important collection of inscriptions
and these inscriptions were placed
where today is the Chiaramonti Museum.
Therefore, the set up
consisted on the displacement
of the inscriptions, which were
taken away from the Chiaramonti Museum
and placed in this long corridor.
The archaeologist needs
to observe and understand
the shape of the letters, which is
distorted by the thumb indexing,
for this reason,
when we need to make
renovations or interventions on the
inscriptions of the Lapidary Gallery,
we remove the thumb indexing.
The epigraph is the title page of
a book of history removed
from its space and
its original environment,
therefore its right context is not
in the museum
in which it is exposed.
There is the ideal of leaving
the artifacts
in their archaeological
context, even other artworks
of the same period which are stored
in the museum.
During the excavations of the
Necropolis along Trionfale Street,
inside the Vatican City,
we have recovered from the warehouses
artworks found twenty or thirty years ago,
belonging to that same
archaeological context.
Now those who go to visit
this archaelogical site
can see both the Roman tombs,
and the artworks recovered.
The visitor must be careful,
he should never trust on what he sees:
he always has to think that an artwork
coming from an archaeological dig
has some characteristics
and an artwork coming from a collection
is a work of a different kind.
The artwork has many aspects.
It can be a Greek model or a Roman
reproduction; its meaning changes
in the different historical periods;
there is the Neoclassical culture;
there is the story: Napoleon who
brought the artworks to France
and Canova who brought them back...
there are many historical
aspects to be considered
in our culture.
The viewer has to face
a complex task,
going through these museums,
he must try to perceive
the value of the artworks,
but also the design of this museum
divided by centuries: the sixteenth,
the eighteenth,
the nineteenth century,
in which meanings change
according to their historical time.
We are now entering the
Greek Cross Hall
and two masterpieces
of Roman sculpture greet us:
they are two red porphyry
sarcophagi.
The red porphyry color is
usual referred to an
imperial power,
in fact these
two sarcophagi have hosted
the spoils of
the mother and the daughter
of the Emperor
Constantine, the first
Christian emperor.
In this one there was Elena,
his mother
and in the other one, Costanza,
his daughter.
Now if you see, this is
a sarcophagus with military themes,
there are Roman soldiers horseback...
And below we see the barbarians,
some barbarian prisoners
overwhelmed by the Roman soldiers.
How is it possible that
these male subjects
could be dedicated to a woman?
Actually this sarcophagus
was probably,
who knows,
for the emperor himself,
but as his mother
died before him,
he dedicated this
amazing sarcophagus to her.
At this time, we are
now approaching to
two particular collections...
the collections
of the Gregorian Museums
which host Egyptians and Etruscans
findings,
worlds so distant in time
but so full of surprises,
that we'll find out in our next stop.
in the Vatican Museums
starts from here:
from the Octagonal Court,
so called
for its shape with eight sides.
We are surronded by statues,
masterpieces
of the classical period,
as the Belvedere Apollo
but also the representation of
the Tigri River
which looks like an old men
with a full beard.
and many other marble masterpieces.
Why had popes collected
in the past time
pagan artworks of pagan dieties?
The answer is obviuos:
all this happened during the Renaissance.
In that period arouse
a new interest
in the Classical world
and its masterpieces.
Popes shared a passion for
antiquities as well,
above all Pope Julius II.
When the marble group of the Laoocon
was located here,
the Vatican Museums didn't exist
yet.
Here there was a big garden,
a square courtyard
designed by Bramante,
and it took
250 years to transform it
in its current octagonal shape,
and above all, that popes'
private collections
could become public,
a place open to visitors.
For people coming in the Vatican Museums
one of the most moving experiences
is exactly this place:
the Octagonal Court.
We are under the sky of Rome
VATICAN MUSEUMS DIRECTOR
and all around there are masterpieces
of ancient statuary.
Looking at these statues,
we understand how much
our civilization has been
influenced by the Classical culture.
On 14th January 1506,
the pope got to know that
VATICAN MUSEUMS MODERN ART
DEPARTMENT
an important finding
was come to light,
a magnificent sculpture
on Oppio Hill.
That statue was in a hole
in which the owner of the vineyard
had fallen in.
Pope Julius II called
his architect
Giuliano da Sangallo, asking him
to give a look at it.
They both decided to go to
to Oppio Hill on horseback.
It was a courtyard with
large niches
in which statues were exposed.
A simple setting
with orange trees
TOPOGRAPHY OF ITALY
ANTICA UNIVERSITA' DI FIRENZE
and gushing fountains
in the centre.
It was a quite idyllic place
with decorative elements,
which in the early years
were referred to Aeneid
characters.
VATICAN MUSEUMS - GREEK AND ROMAN ANTIQUITY
DEPARTMENT
The Pope was a warrior but above all,
an enlightened man and he used
the myth as a means to
dialogue with
cultured people of the time:
they were rulers, ambassadors,
who were not only
religious, or Catholics.
Since its origins, the Church
had considered itself as
the heir of the Roman civilization:
from the Imperium of Augusto
and of Traiano
to the Imperium "Sine fine"
of the Roman-catholic Church,
this was the ideal and
the project of popes.
In this sense, the
Vatican Museums
are the fulfillment
of this ideal,
and they host masterpieces
of Greek-Roman statuary.
This marble group
ART HISTORIAN
influenced very much the
artistic culture of the sixteenth century
and all that came later:
the seventeenth,
the eighteenth,
the nineteenth century, and so on.
Even nowadays, perhaps,
it can be considered
a sculptural-pictorial model
for contemporary artists.
There have been many replicas
of the Laocoon
or artworks inspired to it,
even cartoons of newspapers.
When the Laocoon was found, it was
missing of some parts: the priest's
right arm and the son's right
arm as well;
then a controversy arose,
also quite complex,
on how to rebuild it.
The restores had seen
from the beginning, how the
the deltoid was positioned
and that the arm could be
probably bent.
Laocoon had to die
because Troy fell,
Troy had to fall
so that Enea could leave
and lay the foundations of
Rome, with his successors.
The marble drama is composed
by the younger son, who is dead,
Laocoon, suffering
the wound inflicted by the serpent,
and the eldest son
who is trying to run away.
So, there are three sequences
of a drama: three frames
in a unit, as in a tragic film.
The Apollo Belvedere,
the most beautiful man in the world,
the most beautiful sculpture
in the world;
so Winckelmann wrote of it.
Antonio Canova considered it
the supreme model
of statuary art.
We are here now,
in a very particular place:
it's the square vestibule
that leads to the famous
Pio-Clementino Museum,
but if you come this way,
beyond this marble basin,
there's a very famous place.
Few know that here
Leonardo da Vinci worked,
and this let you understand how Rome
was a place that attracted
the greatest artists in the art history,
and in this place there is,
not by chance,
a masterpiece: the
Apoxyomenos statue,
the athlete who washes himself.
It is a Greek athlete,
who after a race and
his effort, washes himself.
Athletes, before the race, sprinkled
oil on their body, and after the race
they put on
fine sand. Finally they took
away everything with
a tool called "Strigil",
a kind of curved spoon,
with which they even rubbed their skin.
Here the athlete is
scraping sweat and dust from his body
with an outstretched arm:
it's right this movement
that makes this statue unique.
Actually this is an "excellent copy".
The original statue was
made by Lysippos,
a famous bronze worker and
Greek sculptor in 320 BC.
The Romans saw this sculpture
and they immediately understood
that it was a masterpiece,
and then they brought it to Rome,
when they invaded Greece.
In Rome, they put
the statue
in the Baths of Agrippa
and it remained there.
Think that an emperor,
Tiberius, fell in love with it
to the point
he wanted it inside his palace,
but then, by popular acclaim,
it was put again in the hot springs.
Now, the Greek original is gone,
and nobody knows what happened to it.
This marble
Roman reproduction was found
among the ruins of an Imperial
Palace in Trastevere
in the mid-nineteenth century.
Thanks to the Roman artists'
ability
to reproduce artworks,
now we know
that Lysippos had made
an extraordinary masterpiece,
which is here,
in its right place.
The Piuo-Clementino Museum
takes its name
from the two popes
who realized it.
We should overthrow
their name order
CULTURE AND CHRISTIANITY
PONTIFICIA UNIVERSITA' LATERANENSE
first Clemente XIV
and then Pius VI.
Clement XIV reigned
for a few years, for six years.
The Franciscan Pope
achieved this museum
dedicated to Greek
and Roman art.
The Piuo-Clementino Museum was born
especially to host
the artworks brought to light
from excavations,
and excavations were many in those years.
Besides the Museum hosts
many artworks of private collections,
because the important Roman
families had in their villas
or in their palaces and gardens
an impressive amount
of ancient sculpures.
The new museum had a purpose,
and it was the first time that
an architect had to face a specific theme:
to build a new museum, a work
never done before, therefore
he had to create it.
The architectural intervention
by Simonetti
VATICAN MUSEUMS - CHRISTIAN ANTIQUITY
DEPARTMENT
was aimed to create new
speficic spaces
inspired to the Classical-Roman
architecture,
in accordance with the neoclassical style,
where sculptures could
live again,
exactly how they were
in the ancient Rome.
Following an analogy process,
as if to say,
VATICAN MUSEUMS,
SUPERINTENDENCE UNIT
the architect conceived an antique
space for ancient sculptures.
Not only it was built using
the model of the Pantheon
for the Round room,
the health spa rooms for the other rooms,
but also ancient mosaics from excavation
or purchased were used for the floor.
The ancient mosaics were detached,
lifted with sabers
and then they were reassembled
in the eighteenth-century context.
There was a "virtual" antiquity:
entering a room,
with marble columns
and ancient capitals which had
been reused
and ancient floor
with mosaics...
one had the impression of
entering a Roman building
with its statues.
So that was really something new,
a new concept for a new museum,
an extremely bold and
brilliant idea.
Masterpieces like those you see
on my right and on my left
are just suitable for
a sumptuous floor
in polychrome marble
like this one.
And the frescoes you see
are the perfect frame
that enhances and honors
these ancient masterpieces.
This is beautifil, isn't it?
What could we ask more?
The Round Hall is the one
that hosts
sculptures of
greater dimensions,
the most important ones
of the collection.
Certainly it was hit
by lightning, therefore it was sacred.
It was inviolable
and untouchable, buried
in the palace court. It came
to light in the second half
of the nineteenth century.
If we watch Hercules at a side,
It has a massive triangular face
where the neck
is even bigger than his head;
however, if you turn on the opposite side,
you see a figure with
a beautiful face.
This means that there were
optical corrections,
and even, at that time,
this artwork was observed from that
position.
The view is always privileged,
it is never a one-way view,
who decides it.
We are in a special place
of the Vatican Museums,
the so-called
Gallery of Statues.
It's an open loggia
on the landscape of Rome
full of ancient Roman sculptures
representing heroes
and deities of the Classical
world: Phoebus-Apollo,
Aesculapius, the Niobe,
Minerva, and all
Olympian deities.
At the end of this room
there is also Ariadne,
in tears, abandoned on
the Nessus island.
We're in the fable, in the myth
and it is singular that
this is happening
in a museum which is also
the testimony of the Christian Doctrine.
Indeed the
Museum is the most eminent place,
which convey, through images
and art, the religious
ideals of the Catholic Church.
In the Pio-Clementino Museum,
there is a room
dedicated to animals,
both ancient and carved
ex-novo in the eighteenth century,
they are also an artistic
expression of an ethological
interest: they were not
figurines
but were represented in action
while they were running away,
hunting or eating or
something else.
Many of them are exotic animals
and the people coming in this
room
could see animals they had never
seen in their all life.
The Meleagro is a
beautiful Roman replica
of an original by Skopas.
It's interesting
because these copies
were reinterpreted by copyists,
which in this case
had put a fluttering blanket,
the head of the boar,
the dog near the Greek hero.
The originality of art
always implies a sort
of "patricide",
we could say that it is necessary
to distance from the
predecessors
in order to find something really new,
a truly novelty.
In the past, there was this character
of originality
which was often reinterpreted
in a series of reproduction.
The reproduction was usually
made by a "copyst",
a sculptor who desired to
put his personal touch in his artwork.
Franzoni is a very skilled
craftsman
with a neoclassical culture and
an extraordinary technical ability,
so that the same Canova
admired him very much.
Franzoni's main artistic feature
is his capability
to express the pathos
of the scene,
so the horse has
his mouth wide open,
the lion is engaged
angrily in biting it;
and then these animals
are almost expressing human feelings.
He had a simply piece
of a horse:
the right one, and a small piece
of the chariot,
and everything was
recreated by him
in a dynamic and vibrant
composition
so much so that this room
was dedicated
to his artwork: "the Biga".
This marble chariot
is surrounded by statues
representing figures of athletic
competitions and circus games.
The purpose is not a philological
interpretation, but to recreate
in this room the cultural
atmosphere of the classical
period.
In the eighteenth century,
especially in Rome,
there was a restoration school,
which had some philology purposes:
the restoration was meant to
query the significance of artwork,
its composition, its gesture,
so that to understand it
and make it clear
to the public. But the restoration
was, let's say, "casual".
If a statue was missing its head
they took another one,
which could typological
and aesthetically fit.
It was important to see
the artwork in its entirety,
in this way its sale price
could be altered
even with controversial
operations.
Sometimes they recreated subjects
non-existent,
other times, from high-relief
they took away
the full-relief figures
which were sold
at higher prices.
A relief that cost 400 ecus
was sold in four
different elements
each of one costed 500 ecus.
They were a little bit like "magicians",
they were good,
but also very smart.
The neoclassical bust has
always made us think about
a White, immaculate,
pure white antiquity,
which in fact it has never existed.
Statues, temples, streets
were all colored, even
very bright colors.
In this period arises
the idea of
the white sculpture, not colorful,
not chromatic, as well as the idea
of a monochromatic architecture.
We will find out that
things weren't how we believed,
that the architectures were
totally painted
and sculptures were
completely plastered and painted,
even those in bronze;
indeed they gave an impression
of vividness.
A white statue was a bad
statue for the ancients.
The colorful cast is very ugly,
but we do not know how
the artist of the time
used the colors: the substances
for the coloring,
the amount of color,
and how much it was diluted.
Augustus has a bright red cloak,
because the purple cloak
was the most visible sign
of the Supreme Commander,
the Emperor.
The Augustus of Prima Porta
is one of the most famous
statues in the Vatican Museums.
It was found at Prima Porta,
the villa of the Empress Livia.
It is a statue
particularly well preserved,
and it is of an artistic high level:
Obviously the Empress
could afford a top artist.
This complex scene,
can be understood much better
if we see it with its color,
as I have tried here to present it.
It is a statue which deals with
the need
to communicate to people.
At that time, there were no means of
mass communication,
there were no newspapers,
radio, television.
It only existed art, sculpture,
architecture
and then all that had to be readable,
in a clear, almost advertising way.
The Vatican Museums are full of
Exempla, i.e. models.
In those centuries, people were coming
to Rome
to visit The Pope's museum,
not only to see Michelangelo,
but, above all, to see some works
of the classical antiquity,
which were considered
fundamental models,
as well as for the modern art.
One of these classical model was the
Belvedere Torso, but there were others.
The Belvedere Torso was in the house
of the most important Roman sculptor
of the end of the 1400, Andrea Bregno.
It is perhaps this sculpture which
allows us
to understand the "mechanical"
human movement.
We are now here
in the Chiaramonti Museum,
consisting of this long space
with many faces that look at you.
They are faces from the antiquity,
mainly from the Roman times.
These are the faces that you would have
met in the streets;
moreover, these statues
were colored:
you could see the color of the eyes,
the color of hair.
It is a unique place,
that allows you
to make a journey in the
society and even in the belief
of the ancient Rome.
But how was this place born?
Well, it is a troubled story.
When Napoleon arrived here,
the Vatican museums were looted.
A pope was deported to France and
he died there.
The successor, Pius VII,
who wanted this museum,
was also arrested.
And most of the masterpieces
of the Vatican Museums
were looted
and brought to France.
At the end of the Napoleonic era,
with the defeat of Waterloo,
France had returned
the looted property
not only to Italy but
also to other nations;
Canova was commissioned to
go to France and
recover all the masterpieces.
Canova was already General
Inspector of the Vatican Museums.
At that time Pius VII decided
to achieve this Museum
with the pieces that were in part
returned from the Louvre,
and many other acquisitions
made in antique shops,
coming from archaeological excavations.
It is the early nineteenth century,
and that's why today we have an
incredible collection of statues.
They are true masterpieces
and Canova was commissioned
to make this Museum by Pius VII,
and he did it by marrying
the Three Sisters of Arts
that is: sculpture, painting
and architecture.
The sculpture, as you see, is
all around us,
but the architecture is
in the form of shelves, all of them
very elaborate, different one each other.
And finally the painting is
right up there, in the lunettes
some of which describe
the birth of this museum,
that still fascinates
all visitors
for this encounter
with all aspects of the past.
Many of the Roman portraits
we have
were common characters,
surely belonging
to upper class, as there was
a cost to be paid:
a private could hardly effort
more than one portrait.
This fact leads us to think
that the portraits
are referring to a famous political
figure, possibly an emperor.
Even today when we go
in a public office
we see the portrait of
our President hung on the wall
and it is a portrait printed
in thousands of copies.
The Romans used the portrait
which could be, at times,
also very realistic
while the bodies, instead,
were very idealized.
Therefore there was a contrast
between the body and the face, the head.
The pose of the Emperor
is an extremely solemn pose
referring to a very famous model:
Jupiter Optimus Maximus, the statue
that was in the Capitoline Temple,
on top of the Campidoglio.
This reference to that model
wasn't intended to
equate the emperor to a divinity
because in the Roman Occident
it wouldn't have been tolerated,
but it was more than an analogy.
The Emperor dominated
the earthly world
exactly like Jupiter
dominated Gods,
so it was a form of parallelism.
There was a whole very subtle game
of references, quotations, allusions,
that, in modern times,
we could recognize
in the political propaganda
or advertising based
on the associations of images,
quotes and subliminal referrals
to popular iconography
which are part of
the collective consciousness.
It's an extremely interesting
sculptural text:
the term means
"She who advances":
it is a nymph, but the notoriety,
the fame of this sculpture
depends on a Freud's journey
in Rome,
around 1907, when he saw it,
he conceived his way of thinking,
a reasoning
on that subject and its condition,
about pathological condition.
Compared to the Pio-Clementino
Museum, the museography of
the Museum of the eighteenth century
is almost
revolutionary.
It is a very spartan museum:
it hasn't fine marbles,
the floor was in cotto tiles,
and now it is a twentieth-century floor.
The Cardinals chose this
Benedictine monk
who will be an
enemy of Napoleon.
and was even taken prisoner
by Napoleon.
There was a period, a few years,
when Rome was ruled directly
by French officials.
There is the famous anecdote
referred to the Secretary of State,
the Cardinal Ercole Consalvi,
to whom Napoleon said:
"I will destroy your Church",
and the Secretary of State answered:
"Dear Napoleon, we, priests,
did not succeed it in 1800 years,
do you think to succeed it?"
Among these statues, there were: the
the Laocoon, the Apollo Belvedere,
the great painting
the Transfiguration by Raffaello,
that is all the extraordinary masterpieces
of the art history.
Antonio Canova tried and succeeded
to bring back
more than half of these artworks,
at their original home.
These artworks are the perfect
expression of the Neoclassicism:
Perseus with Medusa is even
the alter ego of the Apollo Belvedere.
Pius VII wanted to renew the Museum
with artworks of the highest importance,
as well as Canova, who
artistically
defied the Classical world:
it was the Neoclassical era
and then there was
a challenge between the artist
and its original classic models.
When he was keeping
the Perseus in his atelier
he exposed it in front of
the Apollo's mold,
it was clear the deep connection
between the two models.
The Boxers were found
near Pausania
where Kreugas and Damoxenos
were fighting
in a so violent manner
that one with his hand pierced
the other's belly
tearing away his guts.
We are now in a place
which is not open to visitors:
it's the Lapidary Gallery.
All around there are
more than 3600 inscriptions,
some of them were public, others
reported the legionaries name,
sometimes they reported
more intimate, private inscriptions.
Look, here it is
represented a family,
we can read "amor", "love"
a feeling that
re-emerges after centuries.
Actually, these are not only
pages of stone,
they are descriptions of daily lives
or public events,
as well as, most oo the times,
people's sufferings.
Here is the death of Octavia,
who died four years,
nine months, four days old.
Sometimes there are even
the number of hours.
Around you there is
a veritable archive
of people and emotions.
But there are also other
historical artifacts,
as this beam,
which was positioned here;
there are two of them:
it is exactly a "baglio",
a beam which practically
was used
to join the two sides of a ship
and above that beam, it could be put
the bridge of the ship.
In fact these beams are the "bagli" of
the famous Caligula's ships.
Caligula was an extravagant
Emperor,
at times, even cruel.
He built two gigantic ships,
immense, on the Lake of Nemi,
which even housed a palace
and a Temple,
in practice they were a
Floating residence.
When he died these ships
were abandoned,
sunk or sunk on their own,
and all remained there until
the fifteenth century,
when few pieces were found
and now they are exposed here,
in the Vatican Museums.
Here, we can see the feelings,
let's say, of the ordinary people
and also the
madness of an emperor.
The Lapidary Gallery was set up
between 1805 and 1808,
by Gaetano Marini, the prefect of
the Vatican Library, at that time.
VATICAN MUSEUMS - EPIGRAPHY COLLECTION
DEPARTMENT
In the Vatican there was an
important collection of inscriptions
and these inscriptions were placed
where today is the Chiaramonti Museum.
Therefore, the set up
consisted on the displacement
of the inscriptions, which were
taken away from the Chiaramonti Museum
and placed in this long corridor.
The archaeologist needs
to observe and understand
the shape of the letters, which is
distorted by the thumb indexing,
for this reason,
when we need to make
renovations or interventions on the
inscriptions of the Lapidary Gallery,
we remove the thumb indexing.
The epigraph is the title page of
a book of history removed
from its space and
its original environment,
therefore its right context is not
in the museum
in which it is exposed.
There is the ideal of leaving
the artifacts
in their archaeological
context, even other artworks
of the same period which are stored
in the museum.
During the excavations of the
Necropolis along Trionfale Street,
inside the Vatican City,
we have recovered from the warehouses
artworks found twenty or thirty years ago,
belonging to that same
archaeological context.
Now those who go to visit
this archaelogical site
can see both the Roman tombs,
and the artworks recovered.
The visitor must be careful,
he should never trust on what he sees:
he always has to think that an artwork
coming from an archaeological dig
has some characteristics
and an artwork coming from a collection
is a work of a different kind.
The artwork has many aspects.
It can be a Greek model or a Roman
reproduction; its meaning changes
in the different historical periods;
there is the Neoclassical culture;
there is the story: Napoleon who
brought the artworks to France
and Canova who brought them back...
there are many historical
aspects to be considered
in our culture.
The viewer has to face
a complex task,
going through these museums,
he must try to perceive
the value of the artworks,
but also the design of this museum
divided by centuries: the sixteenth,
the eighteenth,
the nineteenth century,
in which meanings change
according to their historical time.
We are now entering the
Greek Cross Hall
and two masterpieces
of Roman sculpture greet us:
they are two red porphyry
sarcophagi.
The red porphyry color is
usual referred to an
imperial power,
in fact these
two sarcophagi have hosted
the spoils of
the mother and the daughter
of the Emperor
Constantine, the first
Christian emperor.
In this one there was Elena,
his mother
and in the other one, Costanza,
his daughter.
Now if you see, this is
a sarcophagus with military themes,
there are Roman soldiers horseback...
And below we see the barbarians,
some barbarian prisoners
overwhelmed by the Roman soldiers.
How is it possible that
these male subjects
could be dedicated to a woman?
Actually this sarcophagus
was probably,
who knows,
for the emperor himself,
but as his mother
died before him,
he dedicated this
amazing sarcophagus to her.
At this time, we are
now approaching to
two particular collections...
the collections
of the Gregorian Museums
which host Egyptians and Etruscans
findings,
worlds so distant in time
but so full of surprises,
that we'll find out in our next stop.