The Vatican celebrates 50 years of the Vatican Museums’ Collection of Modern and Contemporary Art since its 23 June 1973 inauguration by Pope St. Paul VI.
By Deborah Castellano Lubov
The Vatican is celebrating 50 years of the Vatican Museums’ Collection of Modern and Contemporary Art.
Commemorating the anniversary as a significant moment for the youngest collection, the Holy Father met with world-renowned artists in the Sistine Chapel where he praised art’s beauty as inspiring a desire for God, and rendering glory to Him, like his predecessor, Paul VI, had done.
Saint Paul VI inaugurated the Collection on June 23, 1973.
According to the Patrons of the Arts in the Vatican Museums, the original collection consisted of some 1000 works.
Now, the collection consists of nearly 9000 paintings, sculpture and graphic arts donated over the years by artists, collectors, and public and private entities, thanks to donations, acquisitions, commissions, and exhibition promotion.
This Modern Collection composes a large section of the Vatican Museums’ itinerary, the Museums’ website notes.
This is one of the largest collections of contemporary sacred art on the international scene today.
The selection displayed to the public, along an itinerary that passes from the Borgia Apartment up to the Sistine Chapel, offers visitors a rich overview of twentieth century Italian and international art.
Valuable collection of important figures
It includes works by important figures such as Van Gogh, Bacon, Chagall, Carrà, de Chirico, Manzù, Capogrossi, Fontana, Burri and Matisse.
An entire room dedicated to the latter was inaugurated in 2011, housing a valuable collection of works relating to the genesis of the Vence Chapel, which joined the Vatican collections in 1980, thanks to an extraordinary donation by the artist’s son, Pierre Matisse.
Emerging from Paul VI’s desire to reinstate the dialogue between the Church and contemporary culture, the Museums highlight, the Collection covers a time span from the end of the nineteenth century up to the early twentieth century, and “enables the visitor to view unexpected masterpieces of the variegated artistic panorama of the nineteenth century.”
Commemorating 50 years
To celebrate this special anniversary, the Department of 19th and Contemporary Art of the Vatican Museums, through the Curator Micol Forti and Assistants Francesca Boschetti and Rosalia Pagliarani, conceived a ‘diffuse exhibition’, set up in the various sectors of the Pope’s Museums, with the intention of weaving a dialogue between past and present.
Ten works are scattered throughout the museum itinerary, chosen from those recently arrived in the Collection and created by artists of international calibre: Anatsui, Bravo, Fleischer, Gioli, Giuliani, Hadzi-Vasileva, Paladino, Ruffo, Strazza and Vukadinov.
The Salette of the Borgia Tower is hosting a complementary exhibition with a historical-photographic character. It reveals the faces of the personalities involved in the formation of the Collection, the leading artists, the history of the museum displays and exhibition events, and more generally the evolutionary path and the goals achieved in these first 50 years of activity, inside and outside the museum spaces.
The 50th anniversary is also honoured by the publication of a new and substantial Italian volume soon to be published by Edizioni Musei Vaticani: “The Vatican Museums’ Collection of Modern and Contemporary Art 1973-2023. Origins, History, Transformations’ edited by Micol Forti, with Francesca Boschetti and Rosalia Pagliarani.
Pope Paul VI’s wisdom
The majority of the donations resulted from contacts established by Paul VI though his address to the art world, in an encounter on 7 May 1964 in the Sistine Chapel. In his discourse, he underlined the effective distance between the Church and contemporary art, compared with the close and fruitful link of the past, in the hope of bringing them closer to one another.
To celebrate the Collections 50-year birthday, the Vatican Patrons have made a proposal “to share and comingle these modern and contemporary works from the last fifty years with the other departments of the Museums. It will be an opportunity to highlight the link between past and present, preservation and creation, the vision of history, and present participation.”
More information can be found on their website.