This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Museum gathers three museums whose religious collecting became, in each case, as much a part of their story as the objects on display.
Wellcome Collection opened in London in 2007 around the vast collection of medical and ethnographic artifacts assembled by the pharmaceutical entrepreneur Henry Wellcome from the 1890s until his death in 1936. Wellcome collected far beyond conventional medical history, into amulets, ritual objects and other artifacts connected to magical and folk healing traditions worldwide, giving the resulting museum an unusually broad remit spanning orthodox medicine and its esoteric counterparts side by side.
The Vatican Museums trace their founding to 1506, when Pope Julius II opened the sculpture collection that grew into one of the world's largest museum complexes, including the Sistine Chapel with Michelangelo's ceiling and Last Judgment. They remain a working part of the Holy See rather than a secular civic institution, and papal conclaves are held in the Sistine Chapel itself.
Museum of the Bible, opened in Washington in 2017 and founded and funded principally by Hobby Lobby president Steve Green, is the newest of the three and the one whose collecting drew the most scrutiny. Hobby Lobby paid a three million dollar federal fine in 2017 over smuggled Iraqi antiquities, and the museum returned more than seventeen thousand looted or undocumented artifacts to Iraq and Egypt between 2018 and 2021, including cuneiform tablets and a Gilgamesh epic fragment purchased at auction.
What the three share is only the fact that a collector's own reach, whether careful or reckless, shaped what the resulting institution had to hold and, eventually, to answer for.