Ethnos: Vatican Museums Ethnological Collection

This book is an important catalogue, which introduces the ethnological collections conserved in the Vatican Museums – containing works of every age, from pre-history to contemporary, and from every part of the world – to the public for the first time. The catalogue, in addition to providing a comprehensive overview of the extraordinary heterogeneity of the ethnology collection, proposes to introduce the cultural richness of the extra-European civilisations, promoting the diversity as a new perspective of knowledge.

The first part is dedicated to indigenous collections, and each section exposes the most representative artefacts of every continent. The second part focuses on oriental collections; this part is, in turn, divided into sections indicating area of origin. Both indigenous and oriental collections include a special section reserved for Christian art. Among the works, there are devotional objects, statues, prehistoric stones, masks and musical instruments, as well as the prestigious painted rocks of the Wandjina Song Cycle and Chinese painted paper scrolls.

The vast iconographic apparatus is quite suggestive, combining archive photographs and numerous colour images, which are evocative of the habits and customs of different peoples and cultures, and celebratory also of the variety and beauty of the artefacts – true witnesses of 'other' worlds that are still little-known.