L'eredità di Winckelmann nella percezione dell'Antico e il trionfo del classicismo nel Museo Pio Clementino in Vaticano
In: Studi e Ricerche del Parco Archeologico di Pompei: 43, 2020
DOI: 10.48255/1171
Much has been written about Winckelmann’s cultural legacy to which he himself attached great importance. His tireless work in emending and disseminating his own literary output is proverbial, as is his anger at hearing about unauthorised editions of his writings. The Prussian scholar’s writings, and the Geschichte in particular, were subjected to reinterpretations and manipulations. We may also number among the German historian’s legacies the museological operations which emerged in the Vatican from the late eighteenth century to the first decades of the nineteenth, beginning with the Pio-Clementine Museum. In May 1769 Clement XIV Ganganelli ascended the papal throne at a time when Rome had for some decades been experiencing a widespread and highly significant reawakening of interest in antiquities and archaeology. This climate, enlivened by the presence of the Prussian scholar, included the substantial operation which brought into being the Pio-Clementine Museum, planned at the start of Clementine XIV’s pontificate and brought to completion with a monumental extension of the Belvedere buildings by Pius VI Braschi. The iconographic programme elaborated by Giovanni Battista Visconti and his son Ennio Quirino, partly shared with the Villa Albani and due to the Winckelmannian aesthetic, is fundamental to the Pio-Clementine Museum. Its halls and rooms are thematically distinct: portraits of great figures from the history of Rome, statues of animals, the Muses and philosophers, the principal divinities. The greatest novelty of the operation was indeed its “extent”: for the first time, an entire building of substantial dimensions was being devoted exclusively to exhibiting the ancient world with a close link between its collection of antiquities and its architecture. Classical civilisation was being considered as a whole by means of a well-judged and elegant design and often with the exhibits themselves dictating the layout of the new buildings.