We are pleased to announce that our Advisory Board member, Prof. Dr Massimiliano Papini (Archeologia e Storia dell’Arte Greca e Romana, Roma Sapienza) has been appointed as the new Director of the Museum of Classical Art in Rome.
We therefore took the opportunity to interview him about the history and special aspects of the museum.
1) Congratulations, Prof Papini! When will you take up your new post?
I have already been in office since 1 January 2025.
2) What is the museum about? What projects are you looking forward to in 2025, or what initiatives/exhibitions are planned for the future?
The Museum of Classical Art is part of the Sapienza Museum Complex, which is an integrated system of university museums that embrace different fields of knowledge related to both scientific and humanistic disciplines (https://polomuseale.web.uniroma1.it/).
In addition to being visited by numerous students who frequent the rooms for both lectures and study, the Museum is constantly the venue for tutorials (especially for groups of students from the Fine Arts Academies), presentations and lectures, as well as exhibitions of various kinds (including contemporary art), always taking care not to distort the specificity of the collection.
In such an institution, didactic activity (the casts are a valuable teaching aid) and scientific research is essential, as in the case of reconstructions attempted especially during the last century to recover the appearance of the Greek ‘originals’, mostly in bronze. Thus, I plan to organise themed exhibitions directly related to the contents of the museum (such as a project on the art of war and peace) together with the revitalisation of lecture series on Greek and Roman sculpture as well as on the experiences of museum and archaeological park directors in the preservation and use of archaeological heritage. Another hope is that new casts will possibly be made of recently discovered works that have attracted the attention not only of specialists but also of a wider community of the public.
3) The museum has a particular history – could you briefly go behind the scenes? And is there an exhibit or a room that is particularly favourite to you? Or is it the collections as a whole that make the museum special?
The ‘Museo dei Gessi’ at La Sapienza was founded by the Viennese archaeologist Emanuel Löwy (1857-1938), who, since his appointment as professor of Archaeology and History of Art in 1889 at the University of Rome (full professor since 1900), undertook to establish a collection of casts of Greek sculptures (bronzes and marbles), in accordance with a didactic project inspired by the model of the university plaster cast libraries, especially German ones, which multiplied during the 19th century. Over time, through the addition of several units, the holdings have grown to include over 1200 casts, divided into fifty-five rooms. The Museum has thus become one of the most important collections of casts in Italy and Europe, next to those held in Bonn, Berlin, Göttingen, Munich and Basel (https://polomuseale.web.uniroma1.it/it/museo-dellarte-classica).
It was initially housed in the Via Luca della Robbia building in the Testaccio district. Since the construction of the new University City in 1935, the Museum has been housed in the basement of the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy building: here, also through a renovation in 1995-1996, it occupies an area of over 3000 m2 and is open to the public from Monday to Friday, from 9 am to 7 pm. From the very beginning, the exhibition has followed the criterion of chronological order, respected by the illustrious scholars who have served as directors over time, including Giulio Quirino Giglioli, Giovanni Becatti, Sandro Stucchi, Andrea Carandini, Maria Grazia Picozzi and Marcello Barbanera. This is literally a textbook choice, an atlas of images that allows one to traverse the vast spaces as if it were a volume dedicated to Greek sculpture from the 6th century B.C. to the late Hellenistic period, with the inclusion of works from the early imperial age in particular. Such an arrangement is useful for the Museum’s educational role and is essential for a historical discipline such as classical archaeology: it is not possible to subvert historical linearity in favour of interweaving and thematic strands capable of arousing associations of thought and ‘emotions’, as happens in some contemporary museum choices.
However, the visit is no less exciting, starting with the colossal Kouros discovered in the extra-urban sanctuary of Hera at Samos, from a form taken in 1988 from the original in the Museum of Vathy. After the casts of the pediment sculptures from the temple of Aphaia in Aegina used by Bertel Thorvaldsen for their restoration and donated by the Accademia di San Luca in 1948, the rooms devoted to the greatest sculptors (Myron, Polyclitus, Phidias, Praxiteles, Skopas, Lysippus) and those dedicated to the decorations of the temple of Zeus in Olympia, the Parthenon and, against the backdrop of the Farnese Hercules, the marble altar in Pergamon, are impressive; In addition, among the various reconstructions, the one of the Tyrannicides group in the Museum since 1947/1949, created by Quirino Giglioli, a pupil of Löwy, stands out – thanks to the combination of casts of the parts of different copies then considered the best through the practice of critical review.
According to an anecdote passed on by the painter and biographer Giovannni Battista Passeri, a young pupil asked Guido Reni where he got ‘…such noble ideas and beauties of faces so divine in air and features…’; the painter replied ‘These are taught to me…’, pointing to some plaster heads formed from antiquity in his workshop. Thus, in addition to its educational function of explaining not only the forms but also the original contexts and purposes of ancient works, the Museum of Classical Art with its casts is today a place where one can immerse oneself in the beauty of sculpture, one of the fundamental criteria for its evaluation already for the Greco-Roman civilisation.
Rome, 09.02.2025