Vatican Museums exhibit opens in Seoul, South Korea
(Vatican Radio) The Vatican Museums are offering an important exhibit in Seoul, South
Korea from December 8th, the day the Church celebrates the Feast of the Immaculate
Conception. Seoul’s Hangaram Design Museum is presenting the exhibit entitled “Musei
Vaticani”, bringing together through March 31, 2013 a large collection of 70 mostly
Renaissance pieces, including decorative artwork, paintings and sculptures.
Tracey
McClure spoke to Vatican Decorative Arts Curator, Guido Cornini ahead of his departure
for Seoul for the opening of the exhibit Saturday. He notes that while the exhibit
opens in the Christmas season, it continues through Easter next year.
Curators
took special care in drawing up explanatory panels to familiarize a mostly non-Christian
South Korean public with the religious themes of Christian paintings – something that
might “possibly send a message of a common human condition which unifies everybody
in this world,” says Cornini.
Though South Korea is mostly Buddhist, Cornini
points out the “flourishing growth” of the country’s Catholic community and the Vatican
Museums initiative is being supported by the Bishops’ conference and nuncio as an
expression of the vitality of the local Church.
Listen to the extended interview
with Guido Cornini:
Cornini says
curators decided to focus on the Renaissance but not on the period traditionally associated
with the 15th and 16th centuries. Rather, they begin the exhibit
“from Giotto onwards,” reasoning that like Dante Alighieri, the 14th century
Giotto represented the avant-guard of a new way of thinking, “a new way of relating
in particular to antiquity.”
“We start with Florentine and Sienese artists
from the 14th century from the Giottoesque, in fact, school and follow
on with the 15th century tradition in Florence and Siena…and some (artists)
from other central Italian regions like Melozzo da Forli’, the famous painter of the
music making angels everybody goes mad for in the (Vatican Museums) picture gallery.”
But
the highlight of the event Cornini says is Raphael’s Deposition of Christ, a cast
reproduction of Michelangelo’s Pieta’ for Saint Peter’s Basilica and Leonardo da Vinci’s
St. Jerome in the Wilderness - what Cornini calls “one of his most enigmatic works.”
In
addition to the Renaissance works on display, two original sculptures, the Bathing
Venus and Hercules and Telephus date from the Pope Julius II’s 16th century
courtyard of sculptures. Three casts of “the most important (antique) statues recovered
in that same period” are also included in the exhibit: the Apollo Belvedere, the Laocoon
Group,, and the Belvedere Torso.
“This will be the first time,” Cornini notes,
“that people in that ‘remote’ part of the world will experience the possibility to
queue – we hope – and to see these masterpieces and their foundations in the way of
the Western art system…and Western thought.”
“So it will be a once in a lifetime
occasion for these people to see together Renaissance artists on the one hand and
the ancient works which inspired these artists on the other hand.”