Museums at Work - An infinite number of lights. Golden carvings of an Altar Machine

The Museums at Work project, hosted in Room XVII of the Pinacoteca of the Vatican Museums, continues with the exhibition An infinity of lights. Golden carvings of an Altar Machine. The exhibition, curated by Alessandra Rodolfo, Head of the Department for Art of the 17th and 17th centuries, is the first of three exhibition initiatives - two of which can be visited at the Museum Centre of Castel Gandolfo - conceived by the Directorate of Museums and Cultural Heritage.

The Altar Machine at the center of the exhibition, a sumptuous apparatus in carved and gilded wood which was originally an ancient sacred aedicule or a late Baroque processional machine, arrived in the Vatican at an unspecified time only to be transformed - in more recent times and with the addition of the mystical Lamb in the center and a sunburst in the background - in a Forty Hours Machine (forty hours of confusion and faith that elapse between the death on the Cross and the Resurrection of Jesus) for the exposition of the Blessed Sacrament. The Machine recalls the ark where the body of Christ rested and is grafted onto the popular tradition of the Sepulchers which, starting from Holy Thursday, marks the time of adoration and prayer before the Easter resurrection.

Probably used in the Pauline Chapel and more certainly in the Church of Sant'Apollinare in Rome, it remained here from 1984 to 1991, the year in which it was made a museum and exhibited in the Historical Museum of the Lateran Palace.

The exhibition highlights how the Altar Machine was the subject of accurate diagnostic investigations, carried out by the Cabinet of Scientific Research applied to Cultural Heritage and of a complex restoration operation carried out by the expert hands of Stefano Tombesi, Massimo Alesi and Marco De Pillis, at the Paintings and Wooden Materials Restoration Laboratory directed by the Master restorer Francesca Persegati. Finally, the entire project of recovery and valorization of the precious artefact was made possible thanks to the generous support of the Patrons of the Arts in the Vatican Museums - Ohio Chapter.