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Abstract:  ANTIQUARY AND LITERARY THEMES AS A POLITICAL ALLEGORY IN THE PICTORIAL DECORATION OF THE CHAMBER OF THE MUSES IN THE PLUS-CLEMENTINE MUSEUM (1782-1787) The pictorial texts elaborated by Tommaso Maria Conca, under the supervision of Ennio Quirino Visconti, for the decoration of the vault in the chamber of the Muses in the Pius-Clementine Museum between 1782 and 1787, are seen as highly interesting material in their historical-artistic profile. The end is to place in the most appropriate historical vantage point the relation between Fine Arts, Literature and the representatives of these latter schools in the Roman culture during the second half of the XVIII century, Found in the most renowned public place, symbolic of Papal power, the museum, established in 1770. Conca’s paintings withhold particular interest in that they have become a document containing both a cultural as well as a political importance. The depicted scense-wisely orchestrated by antiquarian Ennio Quirino Visconti-portray, on pone hand, the theme of exaltation of poetry and its classic patrons (such as divinities, classic men of letters as well as the most illustrious poets of the ancient and modern times) as sources of artistic inspiration as the well-known maxim from poet Horace “ut picture poesis”. On the other hand, instead it represents the infallibility of Papal power, incarnated by the vicarious of Christ on Earth, at a time of substantial changes in the religious sensitivity and reshaping of the Church’s temporal power.