Anima Mundi

Choose an object and read where it came from before deciding what it meant. The Anima Mundi collection brings together material from many communities and traditions. An object’s place in a Vatican display is one stage in a longer history of making, use and movement. Much of the museum’s early collection came through the Missionary Exposition held for the 1925 Jubilee. Pope Pius XI then founded an ethnological museum, which opened at the Lateran in 1927. After later moves, the collection gained a new home within the Vatican Museums in 1973. The Anima Mundi exhibition area opened in 2019. More recent research has sought connections with the communities associated with the objects, through documents, descendants and the stories of how material reached the collection. Those questions belong beside the appearance of a work. The history of the collection as a whole cannot tell you the circumstances of every transfer. Give the individual label time to introduce the people, place and purpose connected with the object you have chosen.