All change at the Vatican Museum (ctd.)
February 5 2018
The Art Newspaper has an interview with the Vatican Museums' new director, Barbara Jatta, in which she sets out more of her plans to ease the crowds. But most interesting is the way she got the job - there was no interview or application process;
In May 2016, Barbara Jatta was summoned to the Roman home of her boss, Archbishop Jean-Louis Bruguès, the librarian and archivist of the Catholic church. He told her he had received a letter from the Holy See’s Secretariat of State, its central bureaucracy, informing him that Jatta had been chosen to lead the Vatican Museums. This extraordinary assemblage of collections and buildings, created by successive popes, encompasses antiquities, Etruscan objects, a paintings gallery, papal apartments, rooms decorated by Raphael and, of course, Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel.
Jatta was asked immediately to leave the Vatican Library, where she had worked for around 20 years and led the prints department from 2010. She would serve for six months as the deputy to the museums’ then director, Antonio Paolucci, before succeeding him. And that was that. “I went white; I was shocked. It was a radical change for me,” she remembers.
