Valadier Cabinets

The Vatican Museums will reveal to the public the new display of the archaeological collection of the Profane Museum. To celebrate this new layout, which follows the full restoration of the room of the Museum and Valadier’s cabinets, the exhibition “Precious Antiquities. The Profane Museum at the time of Pius VI” and a study day dedicated to the history of the Museum and its collections.

A study of archival and inventorial sources, initiated in 2000, has enabled the various original collections and discovery contexts of the works of the Profane Museum to be traced. The more complete knowledge base thus acquired has led to the formulation of a new display layout for the collection, which was dismantled for the recent restoration of the room and of Valadier’s cabinets.

The project, intended to enable a requalification and revaluation of the collections held within this museum, is based on different and more scientific criteria, involving a layout based on the reconstruction of the original collections and their provenance, alongside thematic sections for those items of unknown origin.

The display is not limited to the historic environment of the Profane Museum, but extends into areas within the Galleria Clementina to enable the arrangement of all the materials, including those hitherto relegated to storage areas.

The room of the Profane Museum will house works from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (principally those from the collection of Cardinal Gaspare Carpegna), which are fittingly displayed in Pius VI’s splendid Brazil wood cabinets.