A woman oversees the Vatican’s art.
VATICAN CITY — Vatican City has been governed by men since it was established as an independent state in 1929. A year ago, however, a woman joined the upper ranks: Barbara Jatta, the first female director of the Vatican Museums.
Since her appointment, Ms. Jatta has put her stamp on the role, resisting some of her predecessor’s initiatives and forging her own path. She oversees some 200,000 objects and an array of museums, papal apartments, courtyards and other sites, including the Sistine Chapel.
The chapel is one of the Roman Catholic Church’s holiest places, where popes are elected. It is also packed with ever-larger crowds gazing at Michelangelo’s famous frescoed ceiling.
Ms. Jatta said that she had worked for 20 years in the Vatican Library, leading its prints department from 2010, and when she heard of her nomination for the Vatican Museums role, “it came as a shock at first, to face such a big change.”
Regarding her gender, she said she “didn’t realize what it meant until I started the job. Whenever I attended conferences or public events, so many women would come up to me, saying: ‘ We are proud, and you are also, in some way, representing us.’ ”
Ms. Jatta said that art had played a big role in her family: Her mother and sister are art restorers; her grandmother, who was originally from Russia, was a painter; and her paternal ancestors founded an archaeological museum in Ruvo di Puglia, in southern Italy.
“Within the male- dominated Vatican, to give such a prominent role to a woman was very good news,” said Eike Schmidt, the German director of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.
One curator now working for Ms. Jatta, Maurizio Sannibale of the Gregorian Etruscan Museum, said he had known her since they were students at Sapienza University in Rome. He described her as “affable, decisive and empathetic” and said that she “knows how to set challenges for herself.”
Running the Vatican Museums is a colossal job. Ms. Jatta is responsible for preserving, displaying and sharing knowledge of all of the treasures accumulated by the popes over the centuries. Whole sections of the museums are undergoing renovations.
Tourism is a lifeline not only of the museums, but of the Vatican as a whole. That complicates any director’s job. So does the fact that many of the sites have both artistic and religious significance — starting with the Sistine Chapel.
Throngs of visitors scurry past masterpieces by Titian and Caravaggio and through a suite of rooms painted by Raphael to reach Michelangelo’s chapel. The sweat and breath of millions, and the dust they bring in, endanger the frescoes, conservation teams have found.
Antonio Paolucci, Ms. Jatta’s predecessor, announced that walk-in visits to the chapel would end once the number reached six million a year, and that after that, advance tickets would need to be bought online. But he left without introducing his plans.
Ms. Jatta, who worked under Mr. Paolucci as deputy director and heir apparent starting in mid-2016, said she was against preventing walk-in access. “If you were a visitor wishing to see the Sistine Chapel and you got to Rome and were told that it couldn’t be seen, what would you do?” she asked. “We are also a museum with moral and spiritual value.”
Ms. Jatta said she planned a second entrance to the Vatican Museums that would offer alternative routes through “parts of the museums that are less visited,” such as the Ethnological Museum, and she was extending hours at other institutions to bolster visits.
Visitors will still want to see the Sistine Chapel, Ms. Jatta acknowledged. She said the central objective was to alleviate congestion.
Visitor traffic aside, Mr. Schmidt said that the Vatican collections were “one of the longest- standing collections of art that mankind has.”
Ms. Jatta’s mission, as she described it, was to “find a way for visitors to see them in the right conditions.”