Museum Secrets director reveals the selection process for six museums in season one

Prior to the nation-wide series premiere of Museum Secrets, this Thursday at 10 PM ET/PT on History Television Canada, I’m giving you a behind the scenes look at creating the first episode: Inside the Vatican Museums.

An interview with Robert Lang

I sat down with Robert Lang, the Executive Producer, to ask him about the episode that he directed with Rebecca Snow.

Amanda: What made you decide to shoot your first episode of Museum Secrets at the Vatican Museums?

Robert:
When we started research for the first 6 episodes of our new TV series, we had several criteria in choosing museums: they had to be important and popular museums, with iconic objects that had great stories connected to them. We decided that the Vatican was one of the top on our list. It has a very large and varied collection, not just religious art, but also masterworks from all over Europe and artifacts from around the world. It has some of the most famous masterpieces of the Renaissance, frescos by Raphael, Botticelli and Michelangelo. But it also has Greek and Roman Classical art. It has stunning buildings. The Sistine Chapel is one of the most visited spaces in the museum… five million people a year visit the Vatican Museums.

So we were looking for that kind of combination in the first museums we filmed – It had to be beautiful, iconic, big, and have varied collections that would allow for great story-telling. The Vatican Museums also has a mystery and allure to it because of its long and deep history.

Amanda: When we watch the first episode of Museum Secrets: Inside the Vatican Museums, what will we instantly recognize and easily connect with?

Robert:
You’ll recognize many of the artworks – but you probably won’t know the stories we’ve dug up about the objects. What we try to do with all of the episodes is take an object or art work that you may have heard about and give a different take on it, tell compelling human tales.

For example, you might know that the Sistine Chapel was painted by Michelangelo, but would you know that he and the Pope had great battles over it, leading to the pope actually striking the artist during one argument? Everybody knows that Michelangelo is recognized as one of the greatest artists of all time, but did you know that up to the time he painted the Sistine Chapel, he wasn’t a fresco painter at all, just a brilliant young sculptor.

Or, take the Raphael rooms — they’re famous for their exquisite frescos, but in Museum Secrets we don’t analyse the frescos. Instead we look at graffiti that was carved into the side of one of the frescos and discover a tale of brutality from the time of the Sack of Rome - most people don’t even see this graffiti when they visit the Raphael Rooms, let alone know where it originated.

The Laocoon is a famous sculpture you may know of, but you might not know who Laocoon was and his part during the final days of the siege of Troy, when he tried to warn his people about the ruse of the Trojan Horse.

But we don’t only take the most recognized objects in the museum. We also tell the unusual stories of artifacts you don’t often get to see: like the story of the restoration of a mummy in the Egyptian Museum or the medieval Chinon Parchment housed in the Vatican’s Secret Archives which reveals new and little-known details about the demise of the Knights Templar.

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Museum Secrets: Inside the Vatican Museums premieres at 10pm ET/PT on History Television (Canada).

Visit the episode page on our website the night of the broadcast for web-exclusive video and interactive features connected to each of the objects we explore in the episode.