Veduta della Scala, Museo Vaticano (View of the Stairs, Vatican Museum, Rome)

In the late 1780s in Rome two independently successful artists, the Italian engraver Giovanni Volpato (1735–1803) and the Swiss painter Abraham Louis Rodolphe Ducros (1748–1810), began collaborating to produce a luxury set of hand-coloured engravings of the newly-opened ‘Vatican Museum’, or Museo Pio Clementino Vaticano, created to house the Vatican’s collection of antiquities. Ducros is thought to have produced the original paintings, from which Volpato produced engravings that Ducros then hand coloured. Volpato’s original copper plates for the series are today preserved in the Calcografia Nazionale, Rome.

This scene from their Fourteen Views of the Museo Pio-Clementino, published around 1792, shows the entrance to the much-anticipated museum. The vaulted neoclassical atrium in the foreground, called the ‘Vestibule of the Four Gates’, was designed by the Roman architect, Michelangelo Simonetti (1731-1787) between 1771 and 1784 and included a celebrated flight of stairs, now known as the ‘Simonetti staircase’ (‘Scala Simonetti’), which was flanked with antique columns and led to the museum’s Egyptian collections.

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