Governorate of Vatican City State and Vatican Museums
THE ATTIC DINOS FROM THE WORKSHOP OF SOPHILOS
Restorations and antiquarian history
Thursday 19 February 2026 – 16.00
Conference Hall of the Vatican Museums
PRESS RELEASE
Thursday in the Museums on 19 February tells the fascinating story of a nineteenth-century antiquarian pastiche, reconstructed through documentary research and diagnostic studies conducted in the context of a recent restoration. At the centre of the conference is Attic black figure dinos, dating from the first decades of the 6th century B.C., and preserved in Room XVIII of the Gregorian Etruscan Museum.
The dinos (a hemispherical vessel used in symposia to contain wine mixed with water) was acquired in 1837 from the Roman antiquarian Francesco Depoletti for the newly-founded Gregorian Etruscan Museum. The item was notable for its artistic quality and iconographic subject. Despite this, to make the offer more appealing, the antiquarian decided to present the vase in an imaginative composition that would enhance its grandeur: besides giving it a proto-Corinthian lid (about 70 years older), he placed it on a hypokraterion (high stand) reconstructed on an ancient model (Etruscan or Faliscan-Capenate). The attribution of the dinos, variously interpreted as a work close to Sophilos or by one of his faithful imitators, has long been problematic due to the extensive nineteenth-century restoration work.
Diagnostic tests (UV, XRF, Raman, IR), carried out by the Cabinet of Scientific Research of the Vatican Museums as part of the conservation work - conducted under the direction of Maurizio Sannibale, Curator of the Department of Etruscan-Italic Antiquities - made it possible to identify the modern interventions with greater precision and to enhance the original stylistic features, confirming a strong link with the workshop of Sophilos, although without a direct attribution to his hand, to which the fragment of the foot of the hypokraterion, its only surviving original part, could perhaps be traced.
At the same time, the original nineteenth-century composition is being reintroduced into the museum exhibition through the restoration of the hypokraterion - dismantled in the early twentieth century (1922) during a drastic “purist” intervention - and now presented as an emblematic example of antiquarian pastiche, giving the whole and each of its individual components a new historical and critical legibility.
The conference will be introduced by the Artistic-Scientific Deputy Director of the Vatican Museums, Giandomenico Spinola. The speakers will be Maurizio Sannibale; Giulia Rocca, associate professor at the University of Rome Tor Vergata; Fabio Morresi and Francesca Romana Cibin, respectively director and technical assistant of the Cabinet of Scientific Research of the Vatican Museums; and Alice Baltera, restorer of the Metals and Ceramics Restoration Laboratory of the Vatican Museums.
The meeting will be followed by a visit to the Gregorian Etruscan Museum.
The conference will be livestreamed at the following link:
https://www.youtube.com/@MuseiVaticaniMv/streams
Contacts
Press Office: stampa.musei@scv.va
Journalists and media operators who wish to attend must apply via the Holy See Press Office online accreditation system, at:
press.vatican.va/accreditamenti
All requests must be received at least 24 hours before the event.
Entrance is via Viale Vaticano, upon presentation of the invitation, from 15:30 to 16:00
