Chiaramonti Museum

Connecting the Vatican Palaces to the small Palace of the Belvedere is the long loggia home to the Chiaramonti Museum. This museum honors pope Pius VII Chiaramonti, who governed from 1800 to 1823, and is a reminder of the drastic time in the Vatican Collections' history. Following the Treaty of Tolentino in 1797, Napoleon required the Papal States to surrender most of the masterpieces in the Pio Clementino Museum to France.

In 1806, a new museum was established through an extensive purchase campaign conducted by Roman antiquaries and those involved in excavating sites in the Papal States. The Congress of Vienna in 1815 and the tireless efforts of Antonio Canova, a sculptor, were instrumental in recovering almost all the sculptures that were previously taken away. Canova himself oversaw the arrangement of the museum to showcase the "three sister arts" together – displaying antique sculptures, ancient architectural corbels, and frescoes. Painted by young artists of the time and funded directly by Canova, the last of these works commemorate the superior attentiveness of the Pontiffs toward Rome's artistic and cultural heritage. Panel XXI even features a depiction of the Vatican's recovered works from France.

The Chiaramonti Museum boasts an impressive collection of over a thousand ancient sculptures, particularly famous for its Roman portrait busts, as well as idealistic and funerary works. The display method follows Quatremère de Quincy's philosophy, which emphasizes the importance of comparing masterpieces to lesser-known pieces arranged around them. De Quincy had argued against the French sequestrations, stating that art should be displayed in its original context alongside other artworks of varying quality for optimal understanding.

This statue, found in Rome near Campo de' Fiori, is one of the earliest sculptures to enter the Vatican collections; it was already in the Cortile delle Statue in Belvedere during the pontificate of Julius II (1503-1513).

The depiction of Hercules refers in particular to the legends associated with the founding of Rome, and above all to the victory of civilisation over the savagery inherent in ancient Lazio. With his club at the ready and dressed in a lion's skin, the god Hercules carries his son Telephus, born of the priestess Auge.

She was forced to leave the baby in the mountains of Arcadia, where a deer fed him until he was found by his father. Telephus is the king of Mysia. He is at the centre of a vast myth, with many versions, which ultimately links him to the Greek expedition against Troy. This particular statue is a copy from the early 2nd century BC, probably based on a late Hellenistic original.

The relief is part of a composition depicting a trio of women advancing from the right, contrasting with three other maidens depicted in reliefs currently in various museums; these figures are known as the Horai and Aglaurids, probably derived from a Greek original dating from the 4th century BC.

The first maiden in this group was named Gradiva, a Latin term meaning 'she who walks,' by Wilhelm Jensen in his novella, *Gradiva. A Pompeian Fantasy (1903).

Carl Gustav Jung highlighted this novella to Sigmund Freud, who subsequently analysed it as a psychiatric case study in his essay *Delirium and Dream in Jensen's Gradiva* (1906), illustrating how external stimuli can reveal underlying psychological tensions. In Rome, Freud, an avid collector of ancient art, acquired a cast of this relief, which he hung on the wall of his study next to his famous couch.