This week for our art history class we went to the Vatican Museum! It was a beautiful day and I learned so much from what our professor said, but there were more tourists than I knew what to do with and there’s simply so much art that I felt pretty overwhelmed. Hopefully I’ll be able to go back when tourist season winds down a little and take some time to see it all!
Some of the pieces we saw (the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, the School of Athens, etc.) are so well-known that I hardly need to say anything about them. But the non-Sistine Ceilings! The floors! The framed works tucked away in dark corners! The Pinacoteca is such a winding maze that some paintings (even by famous artists) get lost, like this unfinished painting of Saint Jerome by Leonardo Da Vinci:
We talked for a long time today about the development of Rafael, evidenced by three separate altarpieces hanging together in the museum. My favorite is the second of the three, the Madonna di Faligno depicting Mary & Jesus in a celestial throne and John the Baptist, Saints Francis and Jerome, and the patron of the painting kneeling below them with a cherub holding an inscription block whose letters were scraped off at some point.
Tell me John doesn’t look like Jim from The Office when he looks into the camera:
After this lecture in front of Rafael’s altarpieces, the rest of the visit was a kind of frenzied, roundabout whirl of quickly looking at paintings and frescoes in different rooms, trying to stay together through the tsunami of tourists making their way to the Sistine Chapel. Lots of amazing things though, and lovely views of the Papal Gardens outside.
The most unique thing I saw was not the work of a Renaissance artist but the museum itself: in one room, there was a physical interpretation of a fresco for visually-impaired people to be able to experience the art like everyone else. With a blurb in Braille and a sculpted representation of the painting, it’s obviously not the same as the 2-D original. But museums (particularly art museums!) are so deeply founded on assuming the visitor’s ability to see, and I was so impressed by this move towards being more accessible for everyone. This was the only painting that I saw something like this for, but it’s a remarkable step in the right direction.
Then we arrived at the heavy-hitters. All impressive and important and absolutely deserving of the praise and study they’ve received through the centuries, but made harder to enjoy because of all the people around. And the security guards yelling “SHHH NO PHOTOS” at us in the Sistine Chapel (don’t tattle on me please). Still, a jaw-dropping visit.
Wright Now 