An Innovator at the Vatican MUSEUMS Museums' New Director

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An Innovator at the Vatican

MUSEUMS

Museums’ new director, Barbara Jatta, aims to focus on conservation, restoration and crowd control

BY FRANCIS X. ROCCA

Vatican City

THE VATICAN is a famously male-dominated institution, but on at least one count, it’s beaten the secular world in creating opportunities for women.

Pope Francis’s decision to appoint Barbara Jatta as director of the Vatican Museums in December makes it the first of the world’s most important museums to have a woman at the helm— ahead of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the British Museum,

the Prado Museum and the Louvre.

Her appointment reflects a little- known tradition of innovation that belies the Vatican’s image as hidebound and backward, says Ms. Jatta, 54. She intends to exploit the museums’ technological expertise, as she also confronts major financial, administrative and crowding challenges.

It is an especially important appointment for the Vatican, given that the museums are a major source of revenue, with about €300 million ($323 million) in gross revenues a year and at least €40 million in profits.

“I benefit somewhat from the desire of Pope Francis to show openness in so many ways,” said Ms. Jatta, who oversaw the Vatican Library’s collection of rare prints before starting her current job in December. “But I hope I was chosen because of what I did in the Vatican over the last 20 years.” The modern spirit of the Vatican Museums, today the home of the Sistine Chapel with its famous Michelangelo frescoes, as well as works of art by Raphael, Giotto and Titian, is rooted in history. Pope Julius II shared his sculpture collection with scholars and poets in the early 16th century, and Pope Clement XIV opened the doors to a wider public in 1771—both rare gestures for their times.

A major focus for Ms. Jatta will be sustaining the technological prowess of the museum, which boasts eight conservation labs and more than 150 full- and part-time restoration experts undertaking advanced work with lasers, nanotechnology and bio-technology.

The extraordinary breadth of the museum’s collections—which range from ceramics to tapestries to mosaics—offers its technicians and conservators the opportunity to find new ways of caring for everything “from Indian feathers to hair in the Ethnological Museum to Japanese tatami,” Ms. Jatta says. “I don’t think there is another example…of so many and such highly qualified restorers and other professionals working with many different types of material,” says the new director.

For instance, the Vatican has conducted work in using essential oils to protect sculptures and other stone works from biological degradation, says Admir Masic, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Mr. Masic collaborated with museum staff in the early stages of the 2008-2014 restoration of the 17th-century colonnade built by Gian Lorenzo Bernini around St. Peter’s Square.

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The oils are an example of replacing often-toxic synthetic substances with natural materials, the better to protect the restorers and the environment as well as the objects themselves—a priority under a pope who dedicated an entire encyclical to the environment.

“The marble conservation laboratory at the Vatican is among the leading groups working on green and sustainable conservation solutions,” said Leslie Rainer of the Getty Conservation Institute.

Ms. Jatta will oversee completion of an overhaul of Vatican Museums’ website, which had lagged behind rivals’ efforts to engage and inform visitors with lively graphics and information. Once complete, the new site, which now features video and virtual tours of various parts of the museums, will feature an online catalog containing images and descriptive information for more than 10,000 objects.

For all her enthusiasm about innovation, one of Ms. Jatta’s major tasks is a conservative one: to manage the attendance that has boomed in recent years and now reached the limits of what the historic buildings, central attractions in themselves, can bear.

Her predecessor vastly boosted attendance, with a reservation system that reduced waiting time in lines and extra opening hours in the mornings and evenings. The museums now receive more than six million visitors per year, a 40% rise in 10 years.

At the height of the summer tourist season, as many as 28,000 people walk through the Sistine Chapel and the rooms in the Apostolic Palace decorated with frescoes by Raphael in the course of a day. In the Sistine Chapel alone, dust left by visitors over the course of a year—much of it the accumulation of microscopic bits of human hair and skin—takes weeks to remove in an annual cleaning, Ms. Jatta said.

To minimize the damage such crowds inflict on the works of art and improve the visitors’ experience, the museums have installed new energy-saving LED lighting in the Raphael rooms and will soon install new air conditioning systems there, following a similar light-and-air project undertaken in 2014 in the Sistine Chapel.

Working with tour guides and the companies responsible for a large proportion of the visitors, Ms. Jatta hopes to spread out the flow to make the experience in those areas less stressful for people and the artworks themselves.

That means getting people to spend more time in lesser-known parts of the museum complex, including the Etruscan Museum, one of the most valuable collections of artifacts from that ancient Italian civilization. A large elevator will be installed to facilitate access to that museum, which in addition to the glories of its collection, boasts a 360-degree panorama of Rome.

She hopes to attract visitors to other relatively neglected treasures, too, including ancient sarcophagi in the Pius-Christian museum. Non-Christian art is also abundant in the Egyptian Museum, the Greek- Roman Museo Gregoriano Profano and the Ethnological Museum, which features works from non- Western cultures, dating from prehistoric times to today.

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Barbara Jatta, new director of the Vatican Museums, above, in the Greek-Roman ‘Museo Gregoriano Profano,’ a closed wing set to reopen this year. Below left, restoration in the Vatican Gardens; right, Maria Ludmila Pustka (center), head of the painting restoration laboratory, with staff members.

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: ROCCO RORANDELLI FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL; THE VATICAN MUSEUMS (2)

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