ABSTRACT
On a visit to the Museo Pio Cristiano in the vatican, examples of ancient Italian sculpture provide a veritable visual feast. Row upon row, arranged in a loose chronological order, it is easy to study the stone sarcophagi for their iconographical peculiarities and their stylistic qualities. They are organized for inspection by lay persons and professionals, with little information about the patrons or for whom they were intended unless a name is inscribed on the stone surface. Often, nameless faces, usually of a couple, stare back at the viewer, raising questions about who these people were and how their burial containers came to be in the museum. Most of the sarcophagi were discovered during nineteenth-century excavations of the Roman catacombs and formed part of a collection begun by Pope Pius Ix in 1854 which was housed in the Lateran Palace. What happened to the contents? Were they used more than once? What did other generations think about these impressive pieces of Late Antique art? Are these relatively recent discoveries, or did some of these stone sarcophagi have different uses, or ‘lives’, throughout the ages? In this relatively recent context of a museum, the ‘lives’ of these stone sarcophagi are often difficult to discern.2 Though curators and art historians have traditionally researched provenances to determine authenticity, the modern museum erases all previous re-contextualization of these complex works, though the original funerary function is assumed. In the museum they are appreciated for their ‘exhibition value’ rather than their ‘cult value’.3 In fact, a new initiative sponsored by the vatican Museums, the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, and the United Bible
1 I. Kopytoff, ‘The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process’, in Arjun Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things (Cambridge, 1986), 64-94.
