The Pio Cristiano Museum in the Vatican Museums, was founded by Pius IX in 1854, two years after the institution of the Sacred Archeology Commission, which had the task of directing the excavations in the catacombs and protecting their conservation; the museum was to house those artifacts whose conservation on site was impossible. It was set up by Giuseppe Marchi and Giovanni Battista de Rossi.
The museum is made up of two large sections:
- the section that includes architectural, sculptural and mosaic monuments; in it the collection of sarcophagi stands out in a particular way;
- and the section that collects epigraphic material, divided by age and subjects; due to its specialized nature, this section is only open to scholars upon request.
In those years, moreover, numerous finds, especially sculptural and epigraphic, were unearthed from the Roman catacombs, excavated by the newly founded Pontifical Commission for Sacred Archeology (1852): part of them was transferred to the Pio Christian Museum when - for safety reasons, conservation or "visibility" - the place of discovery was not considered suitable for keeping them. Precisely the criterion for displaying the works involved not a little the Jesuit father Giuseppe Marchi and the great archaeologist Giovanni Battista de Rossi, then just over thirty years old.
In fact, the works - almost entirely sarcophagi with Christian figures from the third to the fifth century - were arranged in the large gallery of the Palace following an organic division into similar groups of iconographic themes or biblical scenes, in a purely thematic scan, dictated by a precise didactic will and catechetics, which nevertheless tried to safeguard at least in part the chronological development of the themes.
At the same time, the young de Rossi dedicated himself to the preparation, on the walls of the loggia, of an up-to-date Christian Lapidary, with hundreds of inscriptions, mostly sepulchral, ??divided by themes or places of origin. In 1963, by the will of Pope John XXIII, the Pio Cristiano Museum - together with the Profane Gregorian and the Ethnological Missionary Museum - was transferred from the Lateran to the Vatican, in the new building that still contains it, later completed by Paul VI; here it was rearranged by Enrico Josi, trying to maintain the previous organization (albeit revised with modern exhibition criteria), and re-inaugurated in 1970.
Pio Christian Museum - Vatican Museums
Address: Viale Vaticano, Musei Vaticani, 00165. Stato del Vaticano
Phone: 06 69883332
Site:
https://www.vaticanstate.va/it/monumenti/musei-vaticani/museo-pio-cristiano.htmlLocation inserted by
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