Vatican Museums Wednesday, May 6

When we returned to the Vatican Museums on Wednesday, May 6 we set to working through the other collections more or less chronologically, including a female figure in pottery from 5600 BC in Anatolia, a cuneiform tablet recording a real estate transaction from 2550 BC in Iraq, and—leaping ahead in time considerably—a statue of Anubis, the Egyptian jackal-god, dressed like a soldier from the Roman Empire. As we toured the museum, there were several open windows giving us glimpses of St. Peter’s Basilica from different angles and a view we found particularly amusing – the Pope’s private tennis court and children’s playground (???). In the Pio Clementino we saw one pre-Constantine Christian artifact, a clay lamp from the crypt of St. Sebastian in the Appian Catacombs. At the conclusion of this collection we saw directions to and books and videos of the “Vatican Secret Archives” but we could get no closer than a look down a long hallway which presumably revealed the secret. We were able to dally a bit in the long halls of tapestries and maps, and galleries of paintings and sculpture long enough to recognize the bees as symbolic of the Barberini family and Pope Urban VII, quite frequently featured in works by Bernini, who recognized a good patronage. We finished the day back in St. Peter’s Basilica and with a run through of the Vatican Treasury Museum.