The Mosaics of the Museum of the Campo Santo Teutonico (Vatican City): An Example of the Influence of Antiquity on Artistic and Industrial Production in the Late Nineteenth Century

In the 1880s, the rector of the Campo Santo Teutonico in the Vatican State, Monsignor Anton de Waal, commissioned the Villeroy & Boch company to provide antique-style floors for his archaeological museum. This was a typical small museum set up as a series of period rooms, who brought to the heart of Rome a very common practice in the panorama of historicism and the revival of early Christian archaeology in German art and industries. This essay analyses this story and presents many unpublished archive documents. The text contributes to the reconstruction of an artistic and industrial product intended for a museum that is now lost, and to its reading in an international context.