Gregorian Egyptian Museum

Two reasons collide here. First, the wider intellectual moment: after Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign of 1798–1801 and Champollion’s 1822 decoding of hieroglyphs, all of Europe was gripped by Egyptomania, and Pope Gregory XVI wanted the Vatican to be a serious player in the new science of Egyptology rather than a spectator. Second, and more specific to Rome: much of what would become the collection was literally already here. For centuries Roman emperors, including Hadrian, had brought Egyptian sculpture back to their villas and had commissioned Roman ‘Egyptianising’ works from Italian workshops. Gregory XVI’s 1839 foundation gathered that scattered material into a single museum and added new acquisitions from the antiquities market.

It’s a genuine mix, and the museum labels reflect that carefully. There are real ancient Egyptian pieces — a Book of the Dead papyrus, sarcophagi from the third and second millennia BC, mummies, ushabti figures, and stelae. But there are also a striking number of pieces that were made in Italy, by Roman workshops, deliberately imitating Egyptian style for wealthy Roman patrons who wanted their villas to feel exotic. The famous black-basalt statues in the third room are exactly that — Roman-era imitations, brought here from Hadrian’s Villa at Tivoli. Both categories are original antiquities; they just come from different sides of the Mediterranean.

Very direct. The Emperor Hadrian (117–138 AD) built a luxury villa at Tivoli that included a Serapeum — a shrine to the Egyptian god Serapis — and a reconstruction of a stretch of the Nile called the Canopus, both stocked with Egyptian and Egyptian-style statues. When those ruins were excavated in the 18th and 19th centuries, many of the finds went to the Vatican. Room three of this museum is essentially a modern reconstruction of Hadrian’s Egyptian obsessions, using pieces that once stood in his own villa forty kilometres away. The colossal statues of Antinous as Osiris that appear here have the same source: Hadrian’s grief for his drowned Nile-dead lover was the engine that produced much of Roman Egyptianising sculpture.

Gregory XVI wanted the Egyptologist Ippolito Rosellini, founder of Italian Egyptology and the world’s first holder of a university chair in the field. Rosellini declined but recommended his best student — the Barnabite priest Father Luigi Ungarelli, who curated the collection and designed the original layout. Ungarelli chose rooms in the former private apartment of Pius IV inside the Palace of the Belvedere, and had them redecorated with wall paintings meant to evoke the banks of the Nile. Some of those exotic 19th-century decorations are still visible around the ancient objects.

Yes — several, plus their coffins and the funerary equipment that went with them. The most striking are Third Intermediate Period mummies from around 1000 BC. The museum keeps them under conservation lighting, so they can look dim at first; give your eyes a minute in the case. There is also a nearly complete Book of the Dead papyrus about thirty pages long, which is the funerary equivalent of a spell-book to guide the soul through the afterlife — you can trace individual protective formulae on the strip if the light catches right.