The Vatican Museums

St Peter's Dome
Coffee break at the Caffe delle Carroze, Vatican Museums.
ticket
Vatican Museums day ticket: Plato (a portrait of Leonardo da Vinci) and Aristotle, the central philosophers in Raphael’s ‘School of Athens’

Raphael’s School of Athens was my favourite painting in the Vatican Museums. Michelangelo’s Last Judgement seemed so overblown and vindictive by comparison. It was my first opportunity to take a close look at the paintwork which was fresh and understated, not super smooth as you might expect from a Raphael.

But Morandi’s still lives – one of which included a blue cylindrical mallet alongside his more usual muted-colour domestic objects – seemed more moving to me than the grand set pieces. Although he went for such apparently simple subjects, Morandi was as philosophical about his subject matter as Raphael and Michelangelo:

Morandi, Natura Morta

I believe that nothing can be more abstract, more unreal, than what we actually see. We know that all we can see of the objective world, as human beings, never really exists as we see and understand it. Matter exists, of course, but has no intrinsic meaning of its own, such as the meanings that we attach to it. We can know only that a cup is a cup, that a tree is a tree.

Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964)

The ‘Unswept Floor’ Mosaic

snail shell mosaic

The artist Heraclitus, who designed the ‘unswept floor’ mosaic made by Sosos of Pergamon, Greece, was equally skilled in evoking our confusion between appearance and reality. I wonder how many times a servant, sweeping up after a real banquet, mistook the actual debris of feasting for one the playful depictions of discarded shells, bones, fruits and nuts.

unswept floor mosaic

It was found in the ruins of a villa on the Aventine Hill in Rome, built during the reign of Emperor Hadrian, (117 to 138 A.D.) but the mosaic has been dated to three centuries earlier.

Spiral staircase
The magnificent spiral staircase that leads from the museum shop down to the exit reminds me of the spiral of the snail shell on the mosaic . . . but also of the Nine Circles of Hell in Dante’s Inferno, a timely reminder to us all as we prepare to make our exits!

Links

Vatican Museums, you can book online to avoid the queues, although there weren’t any long queues when we arrived at about 9.45 a.m., and I’d recommend going as early as you can manage and preferably at a quieter time of year.

Raphael’s School of Athens

Morandi’s still life

The ‘Unswept Floor’ Mosaic

Published
Categorized as Drawing