Vatican Museums

Scope

Classical sculpture above all, including the largest concentration of Roman portrait copies of Greek intellectual and political figures.

History of the collection

The collection is conventionally dated from 1506, when Julius II acquired the Laocoön group within weeks of its discovery on the Esquiline and placed it in the Belvedere courtyard.

The Museo Pio-Clementino was formed in the later eighteenth century under Clement XIV and Pius VI, and the Braccio Nuovo and Chiaramonti under Pius VII in the early nineteenth — the period in which a large part of the portrait material was acquired.

A substantial portion of the collection was removed to Paris under the Treaty of Tolentino in 1797 and returned after 1815, an episode that shaped nineteenth-century thinking about where antiquities belong.

Collection notes

The portrait herms are the platform's principal visual source for the philosophers. Nearly all are Roman marble copies of lost Greek bronzes, which means what is on display is a copy of a copy of a likeness made, in several cases, long after the subject's death.

Several carry inscriptions naming the subject, which is what makes them usable as identifications rather than guesses. The Pericles herm is inscribed 'Pericles, son of Xanthippus, Athenian'.