Soft power and contemporary art: Vatican Museums director on fulfilling Pope Francis's vision

THE ART NEWSPAPER
By Christina Ruiz

Jatta became the first woman to lead the Vatican Museums last year Governatorato SCV-Direzione dei Musei

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. 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. “These are the Pope’s museums,” Jatta says. As such, they reflect his priorities, interests and political ambitions. [More]