NEWS STORY: Vatican goes interactive with museum treasures

c. 1996 Religion News Service VATICAN CITY (RNS)-Why spend richly to tour the Vatican museums, along hot, crowded and noisy corridors, when you can take in the artistic richness of the Catholic Church’s artifacts and paintings at home? The question may now be more than academic. The Vatican on Thursday (Jan. 18) unveiled the first […]

c. 1996 Religion News Service

VATICAN CITY (RNS)-Why spend richly to tour the Vatican museums, along hot, crowded and noisy corridors, when you can take in the artistic richness of the Catholic Church’s artifacts and paintings at home?

The question may now be more than academic. The Vatican on Thursday (Jan. 18) unveiled the first in a series of new videocassettes and CD-ROMs for personal computers that feature its most cherished museum collections.


The new merchandise includes 16 videocassettes and the first two of 11 CD-ROMs-Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel and the museum Picture Gallery, which feature the finest Italian painters from the 12th to the 18th century.

Other titles to be released in the CD-ROM collection, called”The Treasures of the Vatican,”include the Raphael Rooms, which house masterpieces of the Renaissance, a tour through the catacombs in the Christian Museum, and walks through the Vatican’s Etruscan and Egyptian museums.

Each videocassette, which runs about 20 minutes, is expected to retail for about $15, while each CD-ROM, which stores information that is retrieved by a laser beam, is set at about $84. Vatican officials said the prices could vary by country. The items should be in stories within a week.

All of the material initially will be available in five languages, including English, and is to be sold in bookstores and computer shops.

The interactive compact disk, in which viewers can scroll along frescoed walls and read material about the painting or sculpture with the click of a computer mouse, took nearly seven years of development, filming and editing, including a three-day film shoot of Vatican grounds from a helicopter, said Luca De Mata, film director of the project.

Viewers can zoom in on one of the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel and call up an accompanying text that describes the work. Or they can”rearrange”the chapel, taking pieces from one fresco, for example, and putting them elsewhere. All of this can be done to the sounds of a Vatican choir and other music on the disk.

Cardinal Jose Castillo Lara, president of the Commission of the Vatican City State, which handles internal Vatican affairs, hailed the CD-ROM project as a grand achievement.”Their release will contribute in a determined way to the sharing of the artistic patrimony of the Vatican museums,”Lara said at a news conference to unveil the material.


He said the project was undertaken because”the Vatican belongs to everyone but not everyone can enjoy it.” Lara said the Vatican would be satisfied to break even financially on the project. But he said he hoped the merchandise would”make a profit to help support the museums,”which collect revenue from admission-ticket sales on about 2.5 million visitors annually, and on gift-shop merchandise, such as reproductions and jewelry.

Alvise Passigli, a manager at the Italian company Scala, which has distribution rights to the work along with E.M.M.E. of Stamford, Conn., said he expects the Vatican to make a”reasonable profit”from the merchandise.”Maybe not in the first year, but I expect they will eventually profit,”he said.

Passigli estimated that about 15,000 CD-ROMs would be sold in the first year.

The computer-video project marks the Vatican’s continuing effort to raise revenue through mass media enterprises. The process began in 1994 with the publication of Pope John Paul II’s”Crossing the Threshold of Hope,”which offers his reflections on religion and spirituality.

Last October, the pope said profits from the book, which has sold more than 20 million copies, would be used to rebuild Catholic institutions in the war-ravaged Balkans.

The announcement was followed by the release of a compact disk for sale in the United States and elsewhere of the pope reciting the rosary. The project was timed to coincide with the pope’s October visit to the United States.

The Vatican has not divulged profit figures from that project. Officials said, however, that they expected to sell more than 1 million copies of the rosary CD in six languages.


MJP END HEILBRONNER

Donate to Support Independent Journalism!

Donate Now!