Vatican Museums wants a Picasso for 500th B'day

ROME: Francesco Buranelli, director of the Vatican Museums, is hoping for an extremely generous 500th birthday present. “It would be nice if some private collector or someone who owns a Picasso would like to give the work to the Vatican Museums,’’ Buranelli said in an interview at his Vatican office.

“I’m sending out a message,” he laughs. The Vatican Museums traces its collection to the January 14, 1506 purchase by Pope Julius II — on Michelangelo’s advice — of a marble statue of the Trojan priest Laocoon and his sons in the death grip of two sea serpents. The collection grew with ancient works of marble and paintings by renaissance masters.

It comprises very little 20th-century art. While the Vatican owns some Picasso ceramics, a painting would be a great addition to a collection better known for renaissance masters and Roman sculpture, Mr Buranelli said.

It could be an expensive present. A collector paid $95.2m for Picasso’s “Dora Maar au Chat” at a Sotheby’s auction in New York in May. “Obviously the Vatican Museums would logically recognise the merits of a donation and remember it in the way that you remember the great philanthropists,” Mr Buranelli said.

“Many Picassos are still in private hands. In private Catholics hands, but the religion isn’t important. I think a collector would like to leave his work to history and link his name to a great artistic institution like the Vatican museums.”

Visitors viewing the Vatican’s collection are very interested in modern art, Mr Buranelli said. Yet the main attractions at the Vatican are the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling frescoes by Michelangelo and Raphael’s Stanzas. Visitors wait up to 45 minutes to buy 12 euro ($15) tickets and brave the crowds to see them.

The viewing areas were originally established for small groups of people to view the collection and the halls are becoming more cramped as the number of visitors grows. This year, Mr Buranelli is expecting a record 4m after 3.8m last year. To try to reduce the waiting time, the Vatican added a new and larger entrance for the ’00 Holy Year and a system of pre-sale tickets is planned, enabling visitors to avoid the line, Mr Buranelli said.

The Vatican Museums’ 500th anniversary is marked by a series of events that began in February this year. They include the October 12 ribbon-cutting of a ’00-year-old necropolis discovered in ’03, when the Vatican broke ground for the construction of a three-level parking garage. An exhibition about the Laocoon statue, which art historians say inspired Michelangelo, opens November 16.

The celebrations end in December, with a three-day conference on the future of museums with scholars and “directors of the world’s greatest museums,” Mr Buranelli said.