The Vatican Museum: Art For People Who Don’t Like Art
Joe Queenan recently wrote a light-hearted piece for the Wall Street Journal decrying “badly dressed museum-goer[s]”:
People go to museums to see beautiful things: madonnas, knights in white satin, glorious sunsets, improbably muscular stallions, anything that’s classy. Why, then, do they dress like pigs?
If he’s complaining about “the jerk in the mesh travel hat”, he’d be aghast at the behavior of the visitors at the Musei Vaticani, enabled by the museum staff. I recently spent a day in there. If you’re looking for a contemplative experience considering the deep beauty of millennia of Western art, I don’t recommend it.
Starting before the museum opens, there’s a long line of people waiting to enter that stretches around the block. (I don’t understand why this is; if you make a reservation online and pay a trivial fee, you can skip the line.) The Vatican decides how many people to let in at once.
The museum is arranged as a linear progression, culminating in the Sistine Chapel. The Sistine Chapel is apparently all anyone wants to see. I heard one tour guide, standing in front of a painted map of Italy bigger than most peoples’ apartments, say in a tired voice: “Here’s another thing they make you look at before you get to what you’re really here for: the Sistine Chapel”.
Until they get there, people shamble along, barely looking at the priceless works of art they’re passing. It reminded me of the Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey ride in Universal Studios Park in Orlando, Florida. There’s a long journey through things that are mildly interesting, but it’s really just a way to keep you entertained while you wait for the people enjoying the main attraction to empty out.
There’s a category of people who take pictures of things without looking at them. If you’re going to do that, why not stay home and look at higher-quality pictures on Wikipedia? Then there’s the set of people who blindly video everything. Does anyone really watch that footage later?
People are entitled to experience the art any way they want. If the “drive-by photography” model floats your boat, then go for it. But it becomes more grating when those people are constantly jostling you if you dare to stand still for a moment. The Vatican lets in so many people at once that it’s a madhouse. I actually felt less claustrophobic in the Spice Bazaar in Istanbul a few weeks prior.
In a modern re-enactment of the Money Changers in the Temple story, there is a multitude of gift shops that you are guided through on your visit. I have never been in a museum with so many places to swipe my credit card.
This is Laocoön and His Sons. According to legend, during the Trojan Wars, Laocoön had the good sense to distrust the gift horse presented by the Greeks. To prevent him from spoiling the Greeks’ ploy, Athena sent snakes to eat him and his sons. This sculpture is one of the most famous and influential of its era.
I visited Laocoön at the Vatican. Between me and the sculpture stood a woman who had been studying Greek and Roman society for over a decade. In order to better understand those cultures, she had become fluent in Latin and Ancient Greek. She’d spent a great deal of time learning about Laocoön. All she wanted was to stand with it in quiet contemplation. Instead, after fighting to the front of the mob, she was hit on the back of the head by selfie sticks and knocked around by amateur videographers. She left quickly, disappointed.
As you walk through the Vatican, you’ll see a shocking number of people resting their body weight on Western civilization’s cultural heritage so they’re more comfortable when listening to their tour guide, or can lean over for that perfect selfie angle. If you remind them that it’s the museum’s policy for visitors not to contribute to the deterioration of these artifacts, they will snarl at you.
The Prima Porta is a famous statue of Augustus. The Vatican owns it. In one last disappointment on the way out, you can see it from exclusively from behind. Visitors are not allowed to walk to the area that would permit one to see it from the front. (I actually did a search to find a picture of the back of the statue to show here, but there are none online, because it’s totally disinteresting.) The museum staff couldn’t be bothered to rotate the statue so it could be experienced the visitors who came to see it.
If you want a quiet, polite, meditative museum-going experience, skip the Musei Vaticani and go to the Capitoline Museums instead.
