At Vatican Museums, a new way of looking at old things

Published: 2006-04-07

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- The problem with being a 500-year-old museum is that the science of collecting and displaying pieces has changed dramatically. To celebrate its half-millennium, the Vatican Museums has decided not to host special temporary exhibits, but to focus on restoring, rearranging or reopening significant pieces of its permanent collection and opening new collections. One of the Vatican Museums' new collections is composed of the smallest items that once belonged to the Pio-Christian Museum: a collection of sculptures, epigraphs and sarcophagi from the catacombs of Rome. The collection includes more than 1,000 medals, cameos, etched or gold-painted glass, ivories, oil lamps and bronze or silver cups and bottles found in the catacombs of Rome and surrounding towns. While they are not famous masterpieces, "the objects are signs of deep personal devotion, of martyrdom and of conversion -- this is the value, the beauty they still transmit today," said Francesco Buranelli, director of the Vatican Museums.

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