1. Introduction

In recent decades a more global attention on a European scale for Christian archaeology has also led to the investigation of broader aspects such as the history of this discipline and its promotion over the centuries. Among these effects are included museum studies and the history of collecting relating precisely to Christian archaeology and antiquities throughout the modern and contemporary age. In the light of this relatively new focus, it would be of great value to provide a comprehensive overview of the development of museums of Christian archaeology in European history, which would be useful both as a basic reference and as a foundation for subsequent studies that fill in the gaps still present in the discipline. In the 19^th century, Giovanni Battista de Rossi^{[1] [2]}, can be identified as the first to deal with this subject, with the intention of including his Lateran Christian Museum with the lapidary that he managed and structured in a more or less unbroken line of important museum experiences. His texts, already almost conceived as an encyclopaedic entry, forms the basis of this present account, which will update and expand the trajectory presented by de Rossi.

Clearly, the history of museums of Christian archaeology in Europe is closely linked to the history of European museums, both archaeological museums and art-historical museums in general. Similarly, its history must be connected with the history of sacred museums in Europe, which are currently the subject of many important reflections regarding their role in contemporary secular society and the challenges to which they have been called over the centuries. We will, however, focus in this entry exclusively on strictly antiquarian and archaeological finds, in the sense of objects representing vestiges of the past not continuously in use or venerated. In this context, we will leave out liturgical objects from other epochs, hoarded in museums and collections but occasionally or not still in use, and especially relics. These mostly came from ancient sites such as Christian cemeteries and were undoubtedly the main contributors to the spread of knowledge about early Christianity and European awareness of Christian archaeology. In any case, these objects are often presented exclusively as a cultural vocation and personal and communal veneration, which we choose to leave out of this overview while emphasising their crucial cultural role in the interest of the discipline. Nonetheless, it will hardly be possible to separate the finds of Christian archaeology in collections and museums from their religious, supernatural, and broader ethnological significance.

In attempting to identify the origin of collecting Christian antiquities, one might be tempted to look at the phenomena of hoarding and display of liturgical materials and relics found in cathedrals throughout the Mediterranean from the 4th century AD onwards. The phenomenon had its most incredible expansion at the height of the Middle Ages with the creation of the so-called treasures of the churches, with their sacristies full of relics and precious objects and their substantial libraries, which form the basis of western knowledge. These themes, however, are much closer to the concepts of sacred museology and on the note to strictly archaeological discourse, even though they are conceptually at the base of the cultural development of the phenomenon we are dealing with. We therefore limit ourselves here to referring to other publications^[3].

2. Historical Development

Like general collecting of antiquities, Christian archaeology entered museum collections during the 15th century. From this point onwards, and for the next three centuries, it was exclusively private collecting linked to specific families or individuals^[4][5]. The access of this material within private collections took place almost exclusively through prestigious donations or, above all, through finds in urban works, especially in the case of important cities such as Rome, which developed greatly in terms of architecture in the 15th century. The first Christian materials to appear in the collections were mainly epigraphs and coins. These are an extremely significant archaeological typology because they rest somewhere between the ancient object and the written source and, consequently, were undoubtedly well-characterised as Christian. The preservation and display of these finds took place either within the houses in dedicated rooms, in special furniture such as small showcases and drawers or, in the case of epigraphs, inserted into the exterior walls of the mansions or family chapels. There was, therefore, a clear desire to exhibit the possession of these materials perfectly in line with contemporary fashions of recovering antiquities and displaying them in courtyards and other exteriors. Such trends characterised the decades up to the 1570s. From this time on, the season of the discoveries of first the Vatican necropolis under the Vatican Basilica and then the Christian catacombs in Rome changed the scenery greatly^[6]. TFirst, the need to preserve artefacts found during the excavations, the Vatican Grottos were set up as a museum of the Basilica itself^[7]. Secondly, the excavations of the Constantinian Basilica and the catacombs echoed significantly throughout the Mediterranean, so that between the 16th and 17th centuries there exploded a rich season of discoveries of Christian antiquities in many areas: Naples, Sicily, all the main centres of Italian peninsula, Provence, Spain, Malta and many other places in Europe. The drive to find authentic or clearly invented early Christian vestiges in all the main centres of the Mediterranean translated into the practice of collecting with the entrance of numerous early Christian artefacts into private collections. The phenomenon adopted similar features more or less everywhere: the practice of private collecting of art and antiquities by nobles, wealthy individuals from different social backgrounds and members of the clergy was already well established in Europe, but from the 1570s onwards early Christian sarcophagi, gilded glass, bones, oil lamps and above all funerary inscriptions began to appear in these collections. Inscriptions were among the most collected early Christian pieces, as they were the most unequivocally Christian. This type of collecting did not yet take any specialised characteristics, fitting perfectly into the Baroque horizon of private museums as an eclectic collection of art, antiquities, curiosities of all kinds, and thus objects of Christian antiquity were always part of more general collections. Among these, it is important to remember the scholar Raffaele Fabretti, who, after working in Rome and collecting dozens of epigraphs, took his collection to his family palace in Urbino in 1690. There he set up his private museum (still extant but now state-owned) displaying the Christian epigraphs with pagan ones, by themes, and using them as the main source for his treatise on ancient epigraphy.

One of the key issues in this development was the fact that the majority of these artefacts were read from a post-Tridentine and anti-Protestant Catholic perspective. They were consequently wrongly dated almost always to the earliest beginnings of the Christian era, in connection with the solid traditions of apostles and martyrs. They thus became objects that ennobled the possessor and denoted his belonging to the truest and most original Christianity. Many of these collections ended with the life of the possessor and all these materials, if not incorporated as public furnishings or in the courtyards of palaces, ended up swelling the antiques market, which was already flourishing on an international scale. Indeed, the 17th century saw the formation of the first sales of Christian antiquities and related materials (such as books, manuscripts and drawings). The centre of the diffusion of this market was almost always Rome and the most important cardinals of the Roman Church had an undoubted role in fostering this dispersion on an international scale. A prime example is the history of the materials from the Roman catacombs sent by Cardinal Francesco Barberini to the scholar and collector Fabri de Peiresc in Aix-en-Provence in the 1630s. Erudite cardinals, scholars and wealthy devotees are indeed the figures to whom we owe the most for the development of collecting Christian antiquities in Europe in the early modern age. However, as the decades passed, the situation saw little change, apart from the raising devotional and apologetic character given to these artefacts, which were increasingly accompanied by bone relics from the burials of the Roman catacombs.

Starting in the last years of the 17th century and continuing throughout the 18th century, the structuring of papal bodies in charge of the control of the catacombs, especially of the extraction of relics and bone relics, led to a dramatic increase in the despoliation of the catacombs and in the access of relics and epigraphs or small archaeological finds into the private collections of wealthy devotees or into churches throughout Europe and even the New World, following the evangelising missions. The process was initiated by the ecclesiastical authority itself and served as material proof of the truthfulness of the Christian Catholic religion.

Such an influx of newly discovered Christian archaeological objects from the catacombs, together with the renewal of studies of ecclesiastical history and the general attention in more analytical research according to the new Enlightenment issue, led to major changes in the collecting of Christian archaeology in the second half of the 18th century.

Indeed, the 18th century saw the appearance of the first expositions of Christian archaeology that were open to the public, and not just a selected audience. The process was clearly in line with the emergence of the great 18th century museums throughout Europe, which were increasingly taking on the character of civic institutions intended for education and that culminated in the last years of the century with the great Napoleonic Museum, today's Louvre, universal in its themes and open to the public.

Already in 1703 Pope Clement XI felt the need to establish a museum explaining the development of Christianity from the first century AD in the Vatican gardens, close to the Belvedere courtyard where the Laocoon had been exhibited for almost 200 years, the heart of the modern Vatican Museums. Clement XI, relying on priest and scientist Francesco Bianchini, financed the collection of archaeological artefacts for Rome and Italy to create a homogeneous collection that could tell the story of the development of the Art of Christian culture from the first century A.D. to his times: the Ecclesiastical Museum. The objects were identified by Bianchini through his dense network of knowledge, purchased or, if this was impossible, had them copied. We thus also see a deliberate intention in the use of casts the museum that makes it clear that the importance of the object on display did not necessarily lie in the antiquity of its physical material or appearance, but in what it communicated from a historical point of view. The collection was never permanently set up for economic reasons, but the experience remained as an inspiration for the important developments that followed^[78].

In the 18th century, Rome was indeed the place where museums of Christian archaeology in the modern sense of the term museum were born. While the century saw a certain stagnation with regard to new or innovative studies on the subject, Christian theology and history was at the centre of important ante litteram dissemination actions precisely through museums. The centrality of Rome in this phenomenon can be understood if one thinks of the political and cultural economic instruments the papacy had to pursue museum initiatives that aspired far beyond the private sphere. At the same time, the will of the Church of Rome to respond to the cultural and political attacks of the Protestant Enlightenment of Europe, by emphasising the authority of Roman Catholicism through its incredible antiquity and the “blood tribute” given by the Martyrs in the early centuries, never stepped back. New museums were an important weapon in this process.

A significant moment in this process was the display of epigraphs from the Roman catacombs in the atrium of the church of Santa Maria in Trastevere in Rome. In 1742, the custodian of the relics, Marco Antonio Boldetti (the main authority of the time in charge of the care and study of the Roman catacombs and the relics contained therein), decided to structure an exhibition of epigraphs from the catacombs in a public area as free as the atrium of the church. This is a very interesting experience, one of the few still existing in its original form, which also inspired similar cases such as the cathedral of Anagni. This exhibition was fully in keeping with the Roman tradition of displaying ancient epigraphs embedded in the walls outside of buildings, but it surpassed it by uniting these archaeological finds with an ecclesiastical building of similar chronology: not only was this collection for public use, but it was also placed in a chronologically and conceptually coherent container.

Although Rome was the centre in which these museographic experiences developed, the impact of Italian and European experiences and personalities who applied to their collections some new concepts of typological systematisation of artefacts to study, education and civic engagement at the local level should not be underestimated. In these museums mostly classical objects, but also various early Christian artefacts, frequently used to illustrate part of ancient local history, began to be exhibited. Such experiences of local archaeological museums, promoted by renowned scholars, also influenced the cultural projects of the popes: Benedict XIV responded to this cultural trend in 1756-57 by opening to the public the Christian Museum connected to the Vatican library^[89]. With the idea of completing the work begun by Clement XI, the collection of Christian archaeological was entrusted to the historian and Oratorian, Father Giuseppe Bianchini^[910]. The Pope linked to the museum high-level scholars who gave great impetus to the world's first museum of Christian archaeology in the modern sense, at the service of the Church of Rome and knowledge in general, as its location in the appendix of the Vatican library immediately made clear. The museum was designed to illustrate the first centuries of Christian history through a comprehensive range of archaeological objects, in particular small objects from the catacombs. The corridor that still houses the museum today maintains the same layout as in the 18th century, of which only the epigraphs were exported. In the original layout, the epigraphs from the catacombs were arranged in the Roman manner, embedded in the walls between the windows. The rest of the artefacts were gilded glass, oil lamps, jewellery, coins and some fakes such as a mosaic plaque that completed the exhibition picture of early Christian art. They were displayed in wooden cabinets and showcases, which are still in use today, according to a typical display method for small archaeological artefacts that had long been used. According to the words of the Pope in the opening document of the Christian Museum, we learn that the intentions of this first museum exclusively dedicated to Christian archaeology were to confirm, through objects, the truth of the Christian religion, to increase the happiness of the people who visited it, to gather in one illustrious place all the relics and remains of Christian antiquity scattered throughout the city for their preservation and care. In the Roman panorama, Benedict XIV's Christian Museum was the only public museum display of Christian antiquities and the only place where artefacts discovered in the excavations of the catacombs were stored for over a hundred years and, thus, a very important point of reference and inspiration. In general, this Roman example benefited from Italian and European experiences, in a very favourable moment for the emergence of other small nuclei of collections and exhibitions of Christian antiquities throughout the 18th century. One example is the Archiepiscopal Museum in Ravenna: between 1727 and 1741, Bishop Maffeo Nicolò Farsetti, after extensive demolition and renovation work on the city's ancient churches, chose the Archiepiscopal Palace to collect the mosaics, tombstones, epigraphs and capitels found and preserved in the city in a dedicated place. In the museum, along with the city's main early Christian treasures, he also incorporated the Chapel of St. Andrew from the Theodoric era. The layout today is much renovated, but the museum continues its life and mission.

The true internationalisation of Christian museums took place in the 19th century, when Rome became the inspiration not only for a great season of excavations and discoveries of Christian antiquities in Europe, North Africa, the Near East, Asia Minor and Eastern Europe, but also for the creation and dissemination of museums of Christian archaeology. We can identify the beginning of this process in one of the most serious moments of crisis of the papacy, the pontificate of Pius IX, which saw the end of the secular power of the Papal States and the annexation of Rome to the Kingdom of Italy, after long struggles and political pressure. In the decades between his brief exile from the Roman Republic in 1848 and the seizure of Rome in 1870, Pius IX used the Christian archaeology of Rome as a propaganda tool. He did this in very different ways, such as fostering the revival of early Christian themes and styles in the fine arts, the promotion of stories of martyrs in literature, the extensive promotion of excavations, research and publications of the Roman catacombs and, of course, the opening of Europe's leading museum of Christian archaeology. What underpinned all of this, however, was the Pope's strong desire to promote an idea of his pontificate as a time of persecution for the Church of Rome and Catholics around the world, just as it had been for the first Christians in the early Christian centuries.

In 1854, Pius IX opened, in person, a Christian Museum in the Lateran Palace. The entrance vestibule of the Palace housed a large plan of the suburbs of Rome and in the central staircase original paintings and inscriptions were placed on the walls. The heart of the museum was the gallery on the first floor, arranged according to aesthetic but also didactic criteria. Twenty-two intact sarcophagi were arranged on the walls, and above them, sarcophagus fronts and inscriptions were embedded in the walls. Going further up, one reached two rooms in which dozens of copies of the main copies of the paintings of the catacombs were displayed, to which were added the original medieval paintings of some Roman churches. Next was the lapidary, with its collection of inscriptions from the catacombs^[1011].

The spirit of emulation of Roman events spread throughout Europe and other areas of the world, starting with the archaeological excavations that necessarily resulted in the influx of Christian archaeological finds into public and private collections^[1112]. With the development of excavations came the growth of collections owned by the archaeologists engaged in these excavations, either in their homes or directly managed by them in the premises of the institutions to which they belonged. Many museums of Christian antiquities, or with large sections of early Christian art, declined in various and particular ways. In Rome, the main archaeologist involved in the discovery of the catacombs was Giovanni Battista De Rossi. He was personally involved, even as a member of the Commission for Sacred Archaeology, in the acquisitions and setting up of the Lateran Museum and the Christian Museum in the Vatican, although he had almost no Christian artefacts in the collection at his private home. Another similar case is that of the Lavigerie Museum, founded on Byrsa Hill in Tunis in 1875 and then managed by Father Alfred Louis Delattre, the discoverer of Carthage from its primitive stages to that of its magnificent Christianity. The museum (still in existence, although now under restoration) was conceived as part of the co-cathedral and primatial Church of St Louis, at that time the General House of the White Fathers and the starting point of evangelisation of Tunisia and Algeria. This evangelisation also included the discovery of the archaeological and artistic wealth of the primitive North African Church. Obviously, the museum was very extensive and focused on the city of Carthage and its surroundings. Special sections were devoted to Christian archaeology, in which exhibits, especially small objects of clear Christian inspiration and iconography, were displayed in classic large wooden showcases with several shelves. On the other hand, mosaics, the flagship of African artistic production even for the 4th-6th centuries, were displayed on walls, according to a very canonical exhibition style. A consistent section of early-Christian Tunisian mosaics are exposed in the Bardo Museum, while in Tunis today, there is a small Paleo-Christian museum set up in the 1970s on the site of the Carthage-Dermech basilica complex. This museum collects only a small part of the early Christian artefacts discovered in the last decades of the 20th century.

These museums set the standard for archaeological collections in general throughout the world. In Athens in 1884 a group of scholars founded the Christian Archaeological Society to promote studies on Greek Christianity and collect artefacts and works of art. Over the years the Society was incorporated with its collections into the new Byzantine and Christian Museum of Athens. This important museum was founded in 1914 and opened to the public in 1924. The director was, for a long time, the archaeologist Georgios Soteriou, who promoted a series of investigations throughout the country, distinguished above all by his focus on the architectural findings of the vast ecclesiastical heritage of Byzantine Greece. The museum was reopened after restoration in 2004. In 1910, the Egyptian Coptic leader Marcus Simaika Pasha established and opened the Coptic Museum of Cairo. He was truly interested in the preservation of Coptic heritage, therefore during his life he had bought and collected Coptic antiquities and various architectural elements from older churches that were undergoing renovation. This was the main nucleus of the museum that was improved with Coptic finds from whole Egypt and is still existing.

However, there were also very particular cases. In Croatia, in the suburban area of Salona, the archaeologist and priest, Frane Bulić, discovered the two large burial basilicas of the Salona martyrs and voluntarily set up a small museum directly on the site. This was a small house decorated on the inside with one room in Pompeian style and one like the catacombs. This mode of display can be traced in various small museums of Christian antiquity, which are connected to the more general phenomenon of the use of copying and faithful reproduction of ancient artefacts and ancient settings, and which was widespread in Europe between the 19th and 20th centuries. This phenomenon applies in several cases to museums, but hardly any trace of it remains today. The most emblematic example is certainly that of the Museum of the Campo Santo Teutonico in the Vatican. This museum was born thanks to the work of archaeologist and scholar Monsignor Anton de Waal, whose impact on Christian archaeology studies in Rome in Europe was very important. The museum is still in existence, but very different as it has gone through various phases in its 'only' 100-year life. The conspicuous collection of artefacts from the Roman catacombs and other early Christian and non-Roman sites was first displayed in rooms decorated as catacomb cubicles, and set up together with copies and casts of other artefacts fundamental to Christian archaeology^[1213].

Despite the short life span of these exhibition experiences, they are very significant for the history of museums of Christian archaeology, because they show how these museums were extremely permeable to the museographic fashion of the time: In this phenomenon we read the application of typically late 19th century museum theories, the setting of pieces and the artistic and museum recreation of their contexts for illustrative and educational purposes^[1314].

With the political and cultural changes in Europe from the second half of the 19th century onwards, there was a continuous diaspora of Christian archaeological objects to foreign museums or to centralised museums in large European cities, through export processes that are not yet well studied for the discipline. In fact, 'Byzantine' sections began to appear in American museums (such as that of the Metropolitan Museum in New York), which still house Christian archaeological artefacts acquired in Europe and Rome, in particular. Additionally, there are very interesting cases of the export of early Christian objects such as the 6th century apsidal mosaic of the Church of San Michele in Aficisco in Ravenna, transported in one piece to the Bode Museum in Berlin, and thus still displayed in a room in which the idea of an early Christian Basilica is recreated^[1415].

On the other hand, there was also a growing local need to avoid the dispersion of material and to keep finds and discoveries of Christian archaeology in their places. During the first decades of the 20th century, coinciding with the emergence of national cultural heritage protection legislation throughout Europe, civic, diocesan, and generally local and provincial museums almost everywhere established rooms dedicated to Christian archaeology. At the same time, the need not to disperse artefacts from the great excavations and discoveries still in progress throughout the Mediterranean resulted in some very interesting cases in museums entirely dedicated to Christian archaeology.

Such is the case with the museum of the Roman Christian Necropolis of Tarragona. From 1923, what can undoubtedly be called the most important early Christian necropolis in Spain came to light in the suburb of Tarragona. The discovery took place in a flourishing period for Catalan culture, in which many scholars, especially ecclesiastics, were engaged in discovering and enhancing the Roman, Christian and medieval past of the region, even with some nationalist cultural exaltation. Among these erudite meadows, mention must be made of Joan Serra Vilarò, who was assigned to the excavation of the early Christian necropolis in 1926. Here he not only excavated, photographed and recorded the necropolis in a very modern way, but always worked to ensure that the finds did not leave the city. He succeeded in promoting the creation in 1930 of a new museum right above the necropolis, creating a very interesting case of continuity between site and museum that only began to be seen much more frequently in Europe from the 1970s onwards. The partially preserved interior layout is also very interesting because it drew totally on the museum experiences of Christian archaeology so far. The collection was displayed in three rooms. In the basement, part of the necropolis was visible, then in the amphorae, some sarcophagi and other materials were arranged. On the first floor, a long corridor surrounding the central hall was used as a gallery and the main decorated sarcophagi and some of the funerary mosaics found in the necropolis were displayed there. The central room is certainly the most interesting: all the epigraphs found in the necropolis, including the smaller fragments, are arranged in the central part of the walls. In the centre of the room, several wooden showcases contain the smaller finds from the tombs. In the basement room, on the other hand, it was possible to have a close look at some of the graves in the necropolis and some large finds^[1516].

This need to keep artefacts in situ as much as possible was also perceived in Rome at this time. In the very first years of the 20th century, in fact, the practice was established of no longer stripping the catacombs of their artefacts, but of keeping them, where possible, in situ, thus creating various exhibition areas within the catacombs or in adjoining sections. This also made the catacombs a kind of museum space^[1617]. Such spaces are maintained and often even implemented today, transforming the catacombs with all their limitations into museums that guarantee the spatial continuity of the archaeological find with its site of origin. With a view to the increasingly developed need for the dissemination and promotion of Christian archaeology, it is worth mentioning that, starting in 1928, the first university institute entirely dedicated to Christian archaeology (i.e. the Pontifical Institute of Christian Archaeology in Rome^[1718]) was equipped with a gipsoteca exclusively dedicated to the exhibition of casts of the most important early Christian artefacts in the Mediterranean. Not much is known about this plaster cast collection that has now disappeared, but what is known for certain is that the collection was created with educational and didactic intentions at the service of students, in line with the other plaster cast collections of academies throughout Europe.

The panorama after the World Wars is, therefore, in line with that of the other branches of archaeology: there were specific sections in the main local or international museums and then some special cases of singular interest dedicated only to this type of artefact or connected to a particular early Christian archaeological site. The 1960s was a period of great change, reflecting the museological and museographic innovations taking place all over the world. The museums and sections of Christian archaeology saw a general season of rebuilding, but at the same time new museums specialised in this discipline were opened. In the Vatican State, while the Christian Museum continued its life quite undisturbed, the museums inside the Lateran Palace suffered from lack of space and management difficulties. So in 1963 Pope John XXIII moved them to a newly constructed building in the historical Vatican Museums. The Pius IX Museum, now the Pius Christian Museum, was rearranged by the archaeologist and professor Enrico Josi according to the exhibition criteria of the time, but trying to maintain the previous organisation with the division of the sculptural works from the lapidary. The new layout was inaugurated in 1970 and can still be visited^[1819][1920]. In the same years, the desire to have an archaeological museum dedicated exclusively to the post-classical era intensified in Rome: thus, the Museum of the Alto Medioevo was opened in 1967. Here are still on display late antique and early medieval objects from Rome and central Italy, Coptic reliefs and textiles, and above all the opus sectile decoration from the monumental domus outside Porta Marina in Ostia, reconstructed inside the museum in its entirety. This remained the only museum dedicated to the archaeology of post-classical Rome in the city until 1998-2000, when there was the major renovation of the National Roman Museum and the opening of the Crypta Balbi Museum. This museum is one of the most successful experiments in the musealisation of a stratigraphic excavation, and exhibits archaeological remains and artefacts that allow an understanding of the transition from ancient to medieval Rome from a topographical point of view.

There are many examples of museums of Christian archaeology outside Rome in the 1960s. These include museums linked to archaeological sites of particular importance, such as the Early Christian Museum in Aquileia, now a branch of the local National Archaeological Museum. The remains of the early Christian Basilica, mosaics from other early Christian basilicas and sites of the city, and Christian inscriptions from the area are collected and exhibited here. It is a museum building encompassing the basilica, designed in 1961 and renovated several times over the years, that allows a comprehensive understanding of the early Christian and medieval phases of this important site.

From 1970s onwards, exhibitions of Christian archaeology have also flourished all over the world^[2021]. Although they are beyond the scope of this text, they are important to understand the appeal of Christian archaeology and its now secured role within the world museum landscape.

3. Conclusion

To trace the history of museums of Christian archaeology in Europe allows us to focus on certain features that define this typology. First of all, the centrality of Rome: the cultural phenomena occurring in the Eternal City have always been influencing those in other places and often overpowered them in subsequent critical studies. Secondly, it has always remained a more shadowy phenomenon, difficult to identify, hidden by the more famous and striking processes of collecting antiquities of the classical age. Few museums are actually dedicated solely to this theme, while it has always been preferred to structure specific rooms for late antique, early Christian and medieval archaeology in bigger museums all over the world.

Apart from what is specified in the introduction about the separation from "sacred" museums tout-court, the development of museums of Christian archaeology also appears to be almost always connected with the need for edifying narratives and religious education, even though it tends to be a private collection for a long time. Its fates follow those of the discoveries of Christian archaeology but somehow surpass them, always assuming more political, celebratory and personal features.