By Farah Nayeri, Art& Design, Dec. 25, 2017<\/p>\n
VATICAN CITY \u2014 Vatican City has been governed by men since it was established as an independent state in 1929. A year ago, however, a <\/a>woman <\/a>joined the <\/a>upper ranks<\/a>: Barbara Jatta, the first female director of the Vatican Museums.<\/p>\n In the 12 months since her appointment, Ms. Jatta has put her stamp on the role, resisting some of her predecessor\u2019s initiatives and forging her own path.<\/p>\n Ms. Jatta was the only woman on an initial list of six candidates, and she was chosen by Pope Francis. In the post since January, she oversees some 200,000 objects and an array of museums, papal apartments, sculpture courtyards and other sites, including the Sistine Chapel<\/a>.<\/p>\n The chapel is one of the Roman Catholic Church\u2019s holiest places, where popes are elected. It is also packed almost daily with ever-larger crowds scrambling to gaze at Michelangelo\u2019s famous frescoed ceiling. The Vatican Museums say visitor numbers in 2017 are expected to reach a record, significantly exceeding the six million that Ms. Jatta\u2019s predecessor, Antonio Paolucci, defined as an annual upper limit. The escalating totals pose the toughest challenge to Ms. Jatta\u2019s directorship.<\/p>\n Ms. Jatta is friendly yet firm, and she expresses high ambitions for herself and for the institution. In an interview, she said that she had worked for 20 years in the Vatican Library<\/a>, leading its prints department from 2010. When she heard of her nomination for the Vatican Museums role, she said, \u201cit came as a shock at first, to face such a big change.\u201d<\/p>\n Regarding her gender, Ms. Jatta said she \u201cdidn\u2019t realize what it meant until I started the job. Whenever I attended conferences or public events, so many women would come up to me, saying: \u2018We are proud, and you are also, in some way, representing us.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n Her office, which overlooks the Michelangelo-designed dome of St. Peter\u2019s Basilica, was filled with family pictures, a framed photograph of Pope Francis, and the portrait bust of another predecessor: the neo-Classical sculptor Antonio Canova, the first director of the papal museums.<\/p>\n Ms. Jatta said that art had played a big role in her family: Her mother and sister are art restorers; her grandmother, who was originally from Russia, was a painter; and her paternal ancestors founded an archaeological museum named after the family in Ruvo di Puglia, in southern Italy.<\/p>\n Eike Schmidt, the German director of the Uffizi Gallery<\/a> in Florence, said Ms. Jatta\u2019s appointment was a positive sign. \u201cWithin the male-dominated Vatican, to give such a prominent role to a woman was very good news,\u201d he said, adding that he hoped the world of culture would soon \u201cmove beyond\u201d gender considerations and \u201clook at people for what they did and what they do.\u201d<\/p>\n One curator now working for Ms. Jatta, Maurizio Sannibale of the Gregorian Etruscan Museum<\/a>, said he had known her since they were students at Sapienza University in Rome. He described her as \u201caffable, decisive and empathetic\u201d and said that she \u201cknows how to set challenges for herself.\u201d<\/p>\n Running the Vatican Museums is a colossal job. Ms. Jatta is responsible for preserving, displaying and sharing knowledge of all of the treasures accumulated by the popes over the centuries, including the vast Egyptian and Etruscan collections, the \u201cLaoco\u00f6n<\/a>\u201d sculpture from the first century B.C., and Leonardo da Vinci\u2019s 15th-century painting \u201cSt. Jerome<\/a>.\u201d In their breadth, history and caliber, the Vatican Museums make the Palace of Versailles in France look like a flashy upstart.<\/p>\n Whole sections of the museums are undergoing renovations ordered by Mr. Paolucci, a former culture minister who was director for nine years and who had previously led Florence\u2019s museums. The renovations include work on a 16th-century public courtyard known as the Cortile della Pigna (one of many projects supported by the Patrons of the Arts in the Vatican Museums<\/a>).<\/p>\n Tourism is a lifeline not only of the museums, but of the Vatican as a whole. Of the 100 million euros, or about $119 million, in annual revenue generated by the museums<\/a>, roughly half goes to the state, according to Mr. Paolucci.<\/p>\n That complicates any director\u2019s job. So does the fact that many of the museums\u2019 sites have both artistic and religious significance \u2014 starting with the Sistine Chapel.<\/p>\n Six days a week, and on the last Sunday of each month, throngs of visitors scurry past masterpieces by Titian and Caravaggio and through a suite of rooms painted by Raphael to reach Michelangelo\u2019s chapel. On a recent afternoon, the sacred enclosure was full of adults gaping at the ceiling, babies in strollers and tour guides with flags on sticks. Guards periodically hushed the crowds, and stepped in to stop people taking photographs.<\/p>\n The sweat and breath of millions of visitors, and the dust they bring in, endanger the chapel\u2019s frescoes, Vatican conservation teams have found. Mr. Paolucci once envisaged a virtual Sistine Chapel on the museum\u2019s premises: a full-size replica or a digital simulation that crowds could experience to limit congestion. He also announced that walk-in visits would end once numbers reached six million a year. From that point, he said, tickets would need to be purchased online in advance.<\/p>\n But Mr. Paolucci left without introducing his plans.<\/p>\n Ms. Jatta, who worked under Mr. Paolucci as deputy director and heir apparent starting in mid-2016, said she was against preventing walk-in access to the museums, even though 2017 totals look set to show another significant increase in the crowds, by about 10 percent. \u201cIf you were a visitor wishing to see the Sistine Chapel and you got to Rome and were told that it couldn\u2019t be seen, what would you do?\u201d she asked. \u201cWe are also a museum with moral and spiritual value. The Sistine Chapel is also a chapel, and that\u2019s something that cannot be forgotten.\u201d<\/p>\n As for a virtual Sistine Chapel, it would take up too much space and cost visitors more, she said. Instead, the Vatican Museums have advised on an immersive multimedia show<\/a> (with a soundtrack by Sting) is to open in March in an auditorium near the Vatican, illustrating the story of the Sistine Chapel.<\/p>\n Ms. Jatta said she also planned a second entrance to the Vatican Museums that would offer alternative routes through \u201cparts of the museums that are less visited,\u201d such as the Ethnological Museum<\/a>. An institution close to Pope Francis\u2019s heart, the Ethnological Museum will soon reopen with expanded displays of the 80,000 objects it holds, many of which were sent from around the world for an exhibition organized by Pope Pius XI in 1925.<\/p>\n Ms. Jatta added that she was extending opening hours at other institutions such as the Etruscan Museum to bolster visits.<\/p>\n Getting tourists to take more notice of other museums is difficult, by its curator Mr. Sannibale\u2019s own admission. And whatever route they take, visitors will still want to see the Sistine Chapel, as Ms. Jatta acknowledged. So how would a new entrance solve the problem?<\/p>\n Ms. Jatta said the central objective was to alleviate congestion, as the Louvre Museum in Paris had done, through \u201ca better distribution of tourists inside the museums.\u201d<\/p>\n Visitor traffic aside, Mr. Schmidt said that the Vatican collections, started around two millenniums ago, were \u201cone of the longest-standing collections of art that mankind has.\u201d They had \u201can almost unique importance across the planet,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n Ms. Jatta\u2019s mission, as she described it, was to \u201cfind a way for visitors to see them in the right conditions.\u201d<\/p>\n