The Vatican Museums:
Pius-Clementine Museum

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Entrance

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The Pius-Clementine Museum is named after two popes: its founder Clement XIV (r. 1769-74) and Pius VI (r. 1775-99), who brought it to completion.

The Apoxyomenos

The Apoxyomenos is a copy of a famous bronze sculpture (c. 330 BCE) by Lysippus (c. 390 - c. 300 BCE), court sculptor to Alexander the Great. The original is lost, but it is known from its description in Pliny the Elder's Naturalis Historia, which relates that the Roman general Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa installed it in the Baths that he erected in Rome, circa 20 BCE. 

Apoxyomenos comes from the Greek verb to clean oneself. Ancient Greek athletes used to scrape off the oils used to anoint the body before competitions with sand and a curved tool known as a strigil. 

Scala di Bramante

A door in the room in which the Apoxymenos stands leadas to the Scala di Bramante, which was designed by the architect Donato Bramante (1444-1514) and built in 1505. 

The Scala di Bramante is no ordinary staircase; it actually takes the form of a double-helix, thereby allowing people (and horses) to ascend and descend without bumping into each other! 

Octagonal Courtyard

​The Octagonal Courtyard used to be known as the Cortile delle Statue (Courtyard of Statues), as it was home to the first classical statues in the pontifical collections. Today, it is home to two of the most celebrated sculptures in the Vatican Museums: the Apollo Belvedere and the Laocoon. 

Apollo Belvedere

Once the most famous sculpture in Rome, the statue is thought to be a Roman copy (2nd century CE) of a bronze original by the Greek sculptor Leochares (4th century BCE). 

The Apollo Belvedere was part of the collection of Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere. When the cardinal was elected pope, taking the name Julius II (r. 1503-1513), the statue was transferred to the Vatican, where it has remained ever since.

Apollo, god of healing and prophecy, poetry and music (and much else), is depicted as an archer. Although his bow is missing, a fletch of arrows is still clearly visible on his back. He steps forward having just fired an arrow. The contraposto of the pose has always been much admired. 

The Head

The god is entirely naked except for his sandals and a cloak known as a chlamys, which is draped across his left arm. His abundant curly hair is tied at the top of his head by a strophium, a band symbolic of gods and kings. 

The Apollo Belvedere had always been greatly admired, but in the 18th century it became the must-see sculpture in Rome when it was praised to the skies by the German art historian, Johann Joachim Wincklemann (1717-68), who described it as "the highest ideal of art among the works of antiquity that have escaped destruction".

The statue sent Wincklemann into rhapsodies of pleasure: "In gazing upon this masterpiece of art, I forget all else, and I myself adopt an elevated stance, in order to be worthy of gazing upon it. My chest seems to expand with veneration and to heave like those I have seen swollen as if by the spirit of prophecy, and I feel myself transported to Delos and to the Lycian groves, places Apollo honoured with his presence—for my figure seems to take on life and movement, like Pygmalion’s beauty."
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The lower part of the right arm and the left hand, which were missing when the statue was unearthed in Anzio (formerly Antium), were restored by Giovanni Angelo Montorsoli (1507–1563), a pupil of Michelangelo. ​​

Statue of Laocoon and His Two Sons

The world-famous ancient sculpture of Laocoön and His Sons was unearthed in a vineyard near the Colosseum in January, 1506. The vineyard was the property of Felice de Fredis, who immediately sold the work to Pope Julius II (r. 1503-13).

The sculpture was put on display in the garden of the Vatican's Palazzo Belvedere, today's Cortile Ottagono (Octagonal Courtyard), where it has been ever since, apart from a brief sojourn (1798-1816) in Paris. 

In Virgil's book The Aeneid, Laocoön was a Trojan priest, who was killed with both of his sons, after attempting to expose the Greeks' ruse of the wooden horse. Laocoön struck the horse with his spear, warning his fellow Trojans not to accept it: 'Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes' ('I fear the Danaans [Greeks], even those bearing gifts').

In his Naturalis Historia (Natural History), Gaius Plinius Secundus (23-79), better known as Pliny the Elder, refers to the Laocoön, which then stood in the palace of the emperor Titus and bore. He attributes the work to three sculptors from Rhodes, Hagesandros, Athenadorus and Polydoros, but does not give it a date or patron. 

When the statue was unearthed, Laocoön's right arm was missing, along with part of the hand of one of his sons and the right arm of the other, and various sections of snake. Over the years the sculpture was restored and all the missing parts were replaced, as was the practise of the time.

Four hundred years later, in 1906, Ludwig Pollak, an Austro-Czech archaeologist, antiques dealer and director of Rome's Museo Barracco, made a remarkable discovery. While rummaging about in a builder‘s yard, close to where the sculpture had been found, he came across a fragment of a marble arm, which bore a stylistic similarity to the figure of Laocoön.

He presented it to the Vatican Museums, where it remained in their storerooms for half a century. It wasn't until 1957 that the fig-leafs and faux limbs were finally removed and Pollak's fragment reattached.  

The Sala Rotonda (Round Hall), with a hemispherical vault imitating that of the Pantheon, was designed by Michelangelo Simonetti and completed in 1779. The floor is made up of ancient mosaics from the first decades of the 3rd century CE,  which were found at Otricoli and at Sacrofano. 

The Antinous

The colossal  statue of Antinous was discovered (1792-1793) at Palestrina and restored by Giovanni Pierantoni. The statue was exhibited in the Palazzo Braschi until 1844, when it entered the Vatican Museums. 

Antinous (c. 111-130) was a favourite and, it is thought, lover of the emperor Hadrian (r. 117-138), who drowned, under mysterious circumstances (accident, murder, human sacrifice), while travelling with the emperor along the river Nile in October 130. Hadrian was devastated by the loss and immediately deified the youth. He also founded the city of Antinopolis, close to the site of his death. The city became a centre for the worship of Osiris-Antinous. 

We see Antinous here  as a god, his head crowned with leaves, ivy berries and a diadem, which would originally have held a cobra (uraeus) or a lotus flower, not the curious object he now sports. The thyrsus (a staff topped with a pine cone), which Antinous holds in his left hand, is also a modern addition.

​To be continued...

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