The newly restored Apollo Belvedere, one of the Vatican’s most celebrated masterpieces, will be on hand—literally, since a new hand is one of the improvements to the second-century marble—to welcome the many millions of extra visitors who pour into the museums of the Holy See and Rome for the 2025 Jubilee Year.
Some estimates suggest that the event will double the tourism figures for the Eternal City, which last year saw 35 million visitors. They will begin to arrive from late December; on Christmas Eve, Pope Francis will oversee the opening of the Jubilee Door at St Peter’s Basilica, traditionally opened just four times a century.
Barbara Jatta, the director of the Vatican Museums, tells The Art Newspaper that the museums will open for an additional two hours each day throughout 2025. “We will be welcoming many visitors, and we hope to give them a much better journey,” she says. “We want people to be able to spend quality time, with quiet and calm, and we want them to make links with the deeper meanings [of the works on show]. The focus of the Jubilee Year will be ‘Pilgrims of Hope’ and, in these difficult times, hope is so important to all of us.”
One of the first exhibitions will be Icons of Hope, at the Church of St Agnes in Rome, opening on 14 December. “It will be an incredible display of masterpieces from Eastern Europe, Russia and elsewhere,” Jatta says. “We want to show icons as vehicles of prayer—because it’s a form of art that is also a prayer in itself.”
Giandomenico Spinola, the museums’ deputy director, says that the exhibition will also connect with the current war in Ukraine. “We hope that by placing these expressions of Christian faith we can bring us back to the one of peace,” he says. The 18 icons, dating from the 15th to the 20th centuries, are mostly works in tempera on wood.
Jubilee Years are held every 25 years by the Catholic Church, although the last, in 2016, was an extra one declared by Pope Francis after his election in 2013. For Jubilee Years, the public is invited to Rome from across the world to visit the major churches of the city—including St Peter’s, St Mary Major and St Paul Outside the Walls. Each has a holy door, opened only for a jubilee.
Bernini on show
Special exhibitions at the Vatican Museums will also include a show of two Bernini works, Damned Soul and Blessed Soul (both 1619), on loan from the Palazzo di Spagna, where they are not usually on public view. Later in the summer, an exhibition of historic photographs will document the churches at the centre of the Jubilee, entitled Seven Pilgrim Churches of Rome, with images by the documentary photographer Romualdo Moscioni to mark a century since his death in 1925.
The marble has suffered from a number of fractures down the centuries
Musei Vaticani
Pope Francis will also be sharing some of his personal favourite works from his private apartments, among them El Greco’s Christ the Saviour, which will be on view at the Vatican Museums in the spring. And Jatta promises “surprise” elements, both at Christmas and again at Easter.
Another important Vatican masterpiece, the museums’ only Caravaggio, his Deposition (around 1600-04), will be in the Holy See Pavilion at the World Expo in Osaka, Japan. “It’s a way of sharing our patrimony at such an important event,” Jatta says, adding that the painting rarely leaves the Vatican, and last did so in 2017.
Other art events for the Jubilee include an exhibition of Modern art at the reopened Museo del Corso, which opened last month and stars Marc Chagall’s White Crucifixion (1938), on loan from the Art Institute of Chicago. The painting is the first in a series of works by Chagall depicting Jesus as a Jewish martyr and highlights the persecution of Jewish people in the 1930s.
Trevi Fountain transformed
Meanwhile, the Trevi Fountain, at present drained for a €300,000 restoration, will be reopened this month with an elevated steel-and-glass walkway; eventually, tourists will be charged for its use. The Catholic charity Caritas benefits from coins thrown into the fountain; last year these netted around €1.5m.
A 45-minute train ride from Rome to Lake Albano, the former Papal summer palace at Castel Gandolfo, now part of the Vatican Museums, will host an exhibition of Renaissance nativities, with paintings by Ghirlandaio and Raphael among others, throughout December.
Back in the Eternal City, the newly restored Apollo is seen as a worthy adjunct to the Papal mascot for the Jubilee, a cartoon character called Luce who is clad in a yellow anorak. According to Spinola, the statue of Apollo—now with his golden hair restored—is a “magnificent piece admired by so many artists, among them Michelangelo, who took the facial features [of Apollo] for those of Christ in his Last Judgement in the Sistine Chapel”.
Apollo’s reconstituted hand has been made from a mould believed to have been used in the original bronze on which the marble piece is based. The hand was originally poised to shoot an arrow, and the Vatican Museums must hope that it now points to a new chapter in the story of success of this most illustrious of world museums.