Pio Clementino Museum

A broken ancient body and a statue with carefully replaced limbs can tell different stories. In the Pio Clementino Museum, look at the sculpture and at the setting built around it. The columns, niches and large halls belong to a later effort to collect, repair and display antiquity. The early nucleus was Pope Julius II’s sculpture collection in the Octagonal Court. Excavations around Rome and donations from collectors expanded the holdings in the eighteenth century. Two popes, Clement XIV and Pius VI, gave this museum its combined name. Architects adapted rooms of the small Belvedere Palace and added new spaces for the growing collection. Restorers often completed ancient fragments with new parts. In the Hall of the Muses, some figures were even changed to form a full group of nine Muses. The Belvedere Torso offers another encounter with a fragment. Its missing parts leave its identity open to interpretation. Look at how much of a body survives before trying to decide which story it tells.