Hall of Animals

Some of these animals owe their finished appearance to people working long after antiquity. The two rooms of the Hall of Animals were arranged under Pope Pius VI in the eighteenth century. Ancient sculptures were repaired, completed and sometimes extensively reshaped for the display. Notice how the marble can suggest a coat or plumage. Coloured stones were chosen to resemble an animal’s colouring or to give the sculpture a stronger visual effect. Animals meet other animals, hunters, heroes and gods. A scene may make you follow a struggle or compare the bodies of different creatures. The sculptor and restorer Francesco Antonio Franzoni played a major part in this work. He and other artists helped produce the stone menagerie you see here. That later intervention is part of the objects’ history. Give the complete animal your attention, then consider how an ancient fragment might have been made into a figure that an eighteenth-century collector wanted to display.