Mirror of the fate of mankind One of the greatest treasures of the world for more than five hundred years. From the very beginning, the Vatican Museums were called upon to show in full the best that was created by the hands of a human creator, comparable in his work with the Creator himself. Now the remains of remote antiquity want to tell us their secrets: about those great artists whose works are stored in museums, about the papacy that created them and at the same time about ourselves. And all this is in the documentary-excursion “Vatican Museums 3D” directed by Marco Pianijani and Niels Hartmann.
The large-scale production, on which forty professionals worked, met all expectations. It shows the best works of the best creators: Leonardo da Vinci, Giotto di Bondone, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Vincent Van Gogh, Marc Chagall, Lucio Fontana, Salvador Dali. A special role in the film, as in the history of the Vatican Museums, play such names as Michelangelo Buonarroti and Raphael Santi. It is their work that has always captivated artists and sculptors of the world, and it is about them that the most spoken on the screen.
I must say that the works of geniuses of art are not just demonstrated. The viewer seems to be next to them, as if feeling what the artist himself once felt. And not only aesthetic pleasure is limited to the splendor of the film-excursion to the Vatican Museums. About all the creations in detail and exciting behind the scenes tells the Director Andrei Konchalovsky, so that each work of art becomes in the film a whole story, which is formed with others in one common plot.
Throughout the picture, the screen periodically appears insertive episode: a man, going through sand or water. Perhaps such artistic inserts are not the best idea of the directors, at least the very use of the image of a half-naked man, which is hardly associated with the image of the artist. But still sometimes the sand slowly sifting through your fingers or falling drops of water help to feel the antiquity and immutability of what is on the screen.
The history of the Vatican Museums, of course, is not left out. Where it began, how it continued, what milestones of its existence are the most significant - all this is said in the film by the director of museums Antonio Paolucci, who infects in his speeches with admiration for works of art and awe of them.
The discovery of the beauty enshrined in the Vatican museums takes place in three dimensions, allowing you to penetrate the art, see it from the inside, touch it. In addition, the film has a wonderful soundtrack, then loud and majestic, then quiet and tense, so that the picture develops unevenly, exciting and constantly surprising the viewer.
Vatican museums are a labyrinth through which you need to move, as if learning your inner world. Each work, no matter how special it may seem, is actually connected with all the others, which allows you to understand and feel the painting of Marco Pianigani and Niels Hartmann. Let it show not all the huge variety of masterpieces enclosed in the walls of the world-famous halls and courtyards, even if sometimes there are a little more notes of admiration in the stories about the creations of geniuses than necessary, but still the film, undoubtedly, can claim the title of what has not yet been in world cinema. And if this idea becomes a tradition, each of us will be able to look into all the mirrors of the fate of humanity, being in the cinema.