Objects of Belief from the Vatican: Art of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas By Christina Hellmich The Vatican Museums received more than five million visitors last year, ranking them among the most visited museum complexes in the world. Future visitors can add the recently reinstalled Vatican Ethnological 82 Museum’s collection to their tours of the Sistine Chapel, the Raphael Rooms, and the Antiquity museums. Largely closed to the public and scholars for decades, new exhibitions from the Vatican’s collection of more than 80,000 ethnological and archaeological objects have started to take shape in the expansive concrete, steel, and glass galleries designed by Vincenzo, Fausto, and Lucio Passarelli that first opened to the public in the late 1970s and closed only a few years later due to the reorganization of other areas of the museum. Thirty-six works from the Ethnological Museum are presently on view in a special exhibition at the de Young Museum in San Francisco. They were created over more than four centuries and span three continents as well as the islands of the Pacific Ocean. Together they offer a glimpse of the scope and richness of the Vatican collection. This exhibition also represents the first time since the establishment of the Pontificio Museo Missionario Etnologico in 1926 that its collection is the sole focus of a special exhibition in the United States. The de Young exhibition draws its inspiration from recent efforts by the Vatican Ethnological Museum to highlight world cultures in the revitalization of its galleries. An extensive program of conservation treatment of the works in the collection is underway, making expansion of the new installation in Vatican City possible. The first publication dedicated to a selection of the museum’s works, Ethnos, was launched in November 2012 in English, and an Italian language edition will follow. Father Nicola Mapelli, who began his tenure as the Ethnological Museum’s fourth director in 2009, expresses this new mission for the museum: “My vision is to revitalize the collection, not to create a museum of dead objects. Using the objects to reconnect with indigenous communities is very important to us. Through the objects we can show the living story of a people: their history, hopes, joys, and desires. Through our exhibitions we can show our visitors from around the world something about the wonderful culture and spirituality of indigenous peoples.”1 The history of the Vatican Ethnological Museum collection points to the complexities of the relationships between indigenous communities and the Catholic Church. Its composition is defined by the geographic scope of Catholicism’s reach. The works are manifestations of beliefs from certain times and certain places around the globe, but they are also reflections of what officials of the Catholic Church valued for their own purposes. Aesthetic choices that might have compelled the convert donors and missionary collectors to send these particular works to the Vatican from within a larger corpus of available pieces often remain a compelling mystery. ART on view FIG. 1 (left): Figure. Tairona, Sierra Nevada of Santa Marta, Colombia. Before 1691. Wood, pigment. Conveyed by Fr. Francisco Romero to Pope Innocent XII in 1692. Ethnological Museum, Vatican, inv. #101461. Photo by Scott McCue. FIG. 2 (lower left): Zoomorphic support. Tairona, Sierra Nevada of Santa Marta, Colombia. Before 1691. Wood, pigment. Conveyed by Fr. Francisco Romero to Pope Innocent XII in 1692. Ethnological Museum, Vatican, inv. #101473. Photo by Scott McCue. FIG. 3 (lower right): Zoomorphic support. Tairona, Sierra Nevada of Santa Marta, Colombia. Before 1691. Wood, pigment. Conveyed by Fr. Francisco Romero to Pope Innocent XII in 1692. Ethnological Museum, Vatican, inv. #101469. Photo by Scott McCue.
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