Translator: Robert Tucker
Reviewer: Capa Girl (Applause) Thank you. Buon giorno. So we start out
with one question: What's a nice God like you
doing in a place like this? To be answered
by another question, which is: Doesn't it seem
a little surprising to you that the Catholic Church
with its long tradition of martyrs who died
to not worship pagan idols owns one of the most impressive collections
of pagan deities in the world? I mean it is something of a paradox,
the Vatican Museums with its 5 million visitors a day,
it has 3.5 miles of collections, hundreds of thousands of works
and a great many of them are naked remnants of a hostile era. Hm! We forget though sometimes
that the Papacy inherited the city. It inherited a ruined Rome,
a Rome that had collapsed under its great ambitions. At the fall of the empire,
the colossal monuments that the emperors had built
had all been destroyed and they lay submerged
underneath the cow pasture that had once been the forum,
or the goats grazing on the Palatine, and it took the Renaissance popes,
in particular Sixtus IV, to decide that it was time
to resurrect that past. And in 1471, Pope Sixtus IV took
5 bronze statues from antiquity which have been protected and guarded
at St John Lateran for centuries, and he gave them to the city of Rome,
opening the world's first public museum. You just heard me correctly. The popes opened the world's
first public museum. So what was Sixtus's dream,
what was the big plan here? His thought was,
art, beauty and pride in the past would be able to help the Romans
to help Rome be reborn, and by that I mean Renaissance, that Rome would be reborn
into a city that was even greater
than its Pagan progenitor. What did he use as his image?
What was going to be the great new logo? The famous Capitoline She-wolf. It was Sixtus who donated
this ancient statue of the she-wolf, who saved Romulus and Remus,
so they could found the city of Rome, and it was Sixtus
who commissioned the two statues of the little twins underneath it,
and the image he gave to Rome was new. It would be a story of how compassion
could overcome instinct. The very first role of art
in Renaissance Rome was how art can promote goodness,
it can promote magnanimity. Now, Sixtus had a cardinal nephew
named Julius, and Julius spent 20 years collecting art
as a cardinal nephew before he was finally elected Pope
in 1503 as Pope Julius II. And Julius II made
a historical decision that year, instead of handing over
a really fabulous personal collection to members of his family
as the Farnesi and Medici often did, he decided to give
the collection to the Vatican and so it was he who founded
the Vatican Museums in 1506. That is incredibly forward thinking, the rest of Europe is gonna take
a 100 years or so to catch up with that one. And so, Julius, I have to admit, Julius
did put a big sign on his front door, it read: "Procul esto profani", "Those of you who are
uninitiated, stay away." And you have to kinda figure
that if your average religious pilgrim in 1500 probably balk
at the site of naked deities gallivanting in the pope's garden,
so it probably makes sense that he wanted to keep it
to an elect few. But in the eyes of Michelangelo, Rafael,
those trained in form, formed eyes, those idols,
they became inspiration, and those works of art would become a great model for a new type
of Christian duty. There is one work that sums up
the success of Julius's museum and it is known as the Laocoön. It is a work that was written up
in the 1st century A.D. It was famous in antiquity,
Pliny the Elder described it, and I quote, as surpassing anything done
in painting or sculpture up to this point. It was rediscovered by Michelangelo
before his very eyes in 1506, and then Julius II purchased it,
showing pretty good taste, given the fact that he didn't have
art critics to guide him back then, and he put it
in the Vatican Museums, where it became
the cornerstone of the collection. And that piece, already famous
in antiquity, was given a new life, and I'm going to quote
Pope emeritus Benedict XVI here. I do sort of feel that
you should not misquote a pope when you're standing
across the street from the Vatican, the bad things might happen. So, Pope emeritus Benedict XVI,
told us that the Laocoön in fact acquires its fullest and most authentic light
in the Vatican context, in the light of the human creature
shaped by God, of freedom and the drama
in his redemption that extends between heaven and earth,
and flesh and spirit, it is the light of a beauty
that shines out from within a work of art and it opens
the mind to the sublime. This work opened
Michelangelo's mind so much that Michelangelo used it
as the opening scene of the Sistine Chapel ceiling, turning it into the God
separating light from dark. Think about this transformation. We go from the image
of a dying pagan to the image of the
creation of all existence; that is what Renaissance
is all about, 330 years before Dostoevsky would
write beauty would save the world, we have the popes
already thinking about it. So, the years pass
and the museums transform and museums begin to take on
a new identity in 1700. And it's not just a space
of inspiration and beauty, a locus for the muses,
as the origin of the word suggests, they become places of memory,
places of identity, places to remember,
collect and cherish past cultures. And so the Vatican Museums
evolved again. And they evolved again
inspired by a culture, that in many ways,
would have seemed hostile to it. It's the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment leaders were just as
inspired by the rediscovery of Pompeii, as Christendom was
by the refinding of Laocoön. They rushed to Rome really fascinated
with these papal collections, but their idea of looking
at the papal works; they wanted to hold up these great statues
in the papal collections, to become symbols of
their new secularized culture. These would be the poster children
of these new republics that would be based
on the models of Ancient Rome, and there was very little space
for religion in their new world picture. But Pope Pius VI at the time,
what did he do, was he scared? No. Did he put a big padlock on the door
with a little sign saying, "Sorry guys, gotta find yourself
another sandbox." – No. He thought and he got himself a curator,
he got himself an architect and he redesigned
the Vatican Museums one more time to turn it into something
that would face the future, and it was a museum
of incredible innovations. It was a museum that:
a) it wasn't for the initiated anymore it was a museum where you see
drawings of men, women, children passing through its galleries, people from all over the world
visiting its treasures, Then number 2) it was funded
by the lottery; he went out and found funding by
instituting a lottery in the papal states, which is something that, by the way,
in Italy we still do today to conserve art. and thirdly it came up with a brand-new plan
with how to design a museum so that when you put an athlete,
you put an athlete's statues in a bath complex. You put God's statues in a Pantheon.
The idea of putting a work of art in a plausible original setting –
born at the Vatican. But one more truly great innovation,
the most brilliant innovation of all, was the purpose of this new museum. It was to invite universal dialogue. This is my favorite picture
of the Vatican Museums because it is Pope Pius VI. He is the sovereign leader
of the Catholic Church, he's acting as tour guide
to King Gustav III of Sweden. So we've heard of pope scientist,
we've heard of pope teachers, but did you know we had a pope tour guide
on top of everything else? And the fact of the matter, that was a
touchy meeting these two were having, they can't talk about religion
because Gustav is the head of the Swedish Protestant Church
and they can't really talk about politics after all Gustav is a Freemason,
so what are they going to talk about? They can talk about the beauty
of man's achievements, they can find mutual accord talking about
the great expressions of humanity, that platform of dialogue,
to quote Benedict XVI, still exists today
in the Vatican Museums, we see it every single day as people
from different cultures, backgrounds, social situations, creeds,
they all stand side-by-side looking looking at those exceptional
works of art. And I have another quote of Benedict XVI
here who tells us a little bit about what dialogue means.
And he tells us that dialogue is possible only on the foundation of clear identity. One can and one must be open, but only when one has something to say
and has acquired one's own identity. And so Pius VI's fledgling museum
was so confident in its own identity, that it greeted visitors then
and if you're paying attention you can still see today
it greets visitors with a provocation. As you walked up the barrel-vaulted
staircase into the Vatican Museums, your very first view as you walk into
the Pio-Clementine collection is a room that is designed
after the Pantheon, temple to all the gods.
And inside that pantheon you have a whole bunch
of pagan god statues. There's Jupiter, there's Juno,
there's Julius Caesar, who, in case you missed it,
he became a god, together with Claudius, and by the way, when you become a god,
you do have the good fortune of getting these rather
extraordinary body lifts, you look much better
as a god in the pagan world. The center boulder,
that beautiful piece of porphyry, was quarried in the 1st century A.D.
by the emperor Nero, transported to Rome,
hollowed out to serve as a bath in one of the halls
of Nero's Golden House. Now, let's just stop and think about this.
We are greeted in the museums with pagan idols
in a pagan temple lolling around the bowl that belonged
to the man who killed St Peter, he killed St Paul, oh, and he killed a couple of hundreds other Christians
while he was at it – next door. This is collective amnesia here, people.
Far from it. That museum, that room, adjoins into
a room dedicated to the Greek Cross. The Greek Cross is early Christian
church building par excellence. It symbolizes indeed the cross of Christ.
And in the arms of this Greek Cross, there are two giant porphyry sarcophagi. And these sarcophagi that lead –
there you see the bronze doors, the hall and the sarcophagi – they lead
into this, they lead from this temple. These two sarcophagi, they were
the burial places of women who were empresses, it has to be
because of that stone, but those women, they weren't merely empresses,
they were also saints. One contained the remains of St Helena,
mother of Constantine, the woman who nagged Constantine
into tolerating Christians. And in this year we celebrate
the 1700th anniversary of Constantine's
legalization of Christianity. And then there's St Costanza,
the daughter of Constantine whose clamorous conversion it changed,
it heralded the transformation of the Roman empire. So what is the great epic tale
of the Vatican Museums? The Vatican Museums tells an amazing story, It's about how Rome
became the eternal city. Years ago when the poet Tibullus
wrote of the Rome without end, at the dawn of the empire,
to flatter the Caesars as they began the adventure
of Imperial Rome, he was referring to a city,
the city that would be built up, that started as brick and ended
as marble in the hands of Augustus. That pagan city then turned around
and spent 300 years trying to eradicate Christianity.
They destroyed its heroes, they destroyed its homes,
they tried to destroy its history, And yet at the end of the 4th century,
those pagans, those persecutors, they became Christian.
And those works of art, those artifacts, those dusty vestiges
of a collapsed culture, they had a new chance. The marbles
of the Vatican would shine again, they would proclaim a far greater and
far more lasting glory, that of Christ. Thank you. (Applause) Host: Thank you, thank you Elizabeth!
