Description
The Vatican Museums are the popes' great art collection, in the Vatican: ancient sculptures, paintings, tapestries, Egyptian mummies and rooms frescoed by Michelangelo and Raphael. They hold everything the popes have piled up over the centuries, and it pays to choose beforehand what to see.
The route culminates in the Sistine Chapel, where the conclave is held. The ceiling, painted by Michelangelo between 1508 and 1512, tells stories from Genesis among powerful figures of Ignudi.
On the wall behind the altar is the Last Judgment, painted between 1536 and 1541. On the side walls, the painters of the 1400s, Botticelli and Perugino among them, frescoed the stories of Moses and of Christ.
Before the Sistine come the Raphael Rooms, the apartment of Julius II painted by Raphael and his workshop between 1508 and 1524. In the Stanza della Segnatura you find the School of Athens, where the philosophers of antiquity talk together under great arches.
In the Stanza di Eliodoro, Leo the Great meets Attila, in a scene more frantic and full of color.
In the Pio-Clementino Museum are the Greek and Roman sculptures, with the Laocoön and the Apollo Belvedere in the Octagonal Court. A little farther on, the Gallery of Maps is a corridor 120 meters long with forty maps of 16th-century Italy under a gilded vault: the pope "strolled through Italy without leaving the palace."
And then all the rest: the Egyptian Museum with papyri and mummies, the Etruscan one with vases and bronzes, the Pinacoteca with Giotto, Leonardo, Raphael and Caravaggio, the pavilion of the popes' carriages, even a collection of modern religious art with Van Gogh, Chagall and Dalí.
It all began on January 14, 1506. In a vineyard near Santa Maria Maggiore a marble statue came out of the ground: a priest and his sons gripped by a sea serpent. Pope Julius II sent two experts to see it, Michelangelo among them.
It was the Laocoön, and Julius II bought it on the spot. A month later it was on display in the Vatican: from that statue the museums were born, opened to the public in 1771 by Clement XIV. Since then every pontiff has added something, and today the visitors number about six and a half million a year.
In May 1938 Hitler came to Rome. Pius XI refused to receive him, withdrew to Castel Gandolfo and had the museums and the basilica closed to everyone: so the Führer did not set foot in the Vatican, not even as a tourist.
The Museums are really many museums. The Gregorian Egyptian has papyri, mummies and a book of the dead; the Gregorian Etruscan, from 1836, eight galleries of vases, sarcophagi and bronzes; the Pio Cristiano the early Christian works. The Missionary-Ethnological Museum, founded in 1926, holds gifts that reached the pope from all over the world.
Don't miss
• The Sistine Chapel.
• The Raphael Rooms.
• The Laocoön and the Apollo Belvedere.
• The Gallery of Maps.
Did you know?
• The museums are in the Vatican, but the entrance is on Italian soil.
• The 1929 Treaty forbids the Holy See to sell the museums' possessions and obliges it to keep them open to visitors.
• The Sistine measures 40.93 by 13.41 meters: the dimensions of Solomon's Temple, as the Old Testament gives them.
The route culminates in the Sistine Chapel, where the conclave is held. The ceiling, painted by Michelangelo between 1508 and 1512, tells stories from Genesis among powerful figures of Ignudi.
On the wall behind the altar is the Last Judgment, painted between 1536 and 1541. On the side walls, the painters of the 1400s, Botticelli and Perugino among them, frescoed the stories of Moses and of Christ.
Before the Sistine come the Raphael Rooms, the apartment of Julius II painted by Raphael and his workshop between 1508 and 1524. In the Stanza della Segnatura you find the School of Athens, where the philosophers of antiquity talk together under great arches.
In the Stanza di Eliodoro, Leo the Great meets Attila, in a scene more frantic and full of color.
In the Pio-Clementino Museum are the Greek and Roman sculptures, with the Laocoön and the Apollo Belvedere in the Octagonal Court. A little farther on, the Gallery of Maps is a corridor 120 meters long with forty maps of 16th-century Italy under a gilded vault: the pope "strolled through Italy without leaving the palace."
And then all the rest: the Egyptian Museum with papyri and mummies, the Etruscan one with vases and bronzes, the Pinacoteca with Giotto, Leonardo, Raphael and Caravaggio, the pavilion of the popes' carriages, even a collection of modern religious art with Van Gogh, Chagall and Dalí.
It all began on January 14, 1506. In a vineyard near Santa Maria Maggiore a marble statue came out of the ground: a priest and his sons gripped by a sea serpent. Pope Julius II sent two experts to see it, Michelangelo among them.
It was the Laocoön, and Julius II bought it on the spot. A month later it was on display in the Vatican: from that statue the museums were born, opened to the public in 1771 by Clement XIV. Since then every pontiff has added something, and today the visitors number about six and a half million a year.
In May 1938 Hitler came to Rome. Pius XI refused to receive him, withdrew to Castel Gandolfo and had the museums and the basilica closed to everyone: so the Führer did not set foot in the Vatican, not even as a tourist.
The Museums are really many museums. The Gregorian Egyptian has papyri, mummies and a book of the dead; the Gregorian Etruscan, from 1836, eight galleries of vases, sarcophagi and bronzes; the Pio Cristiano the early Christian works. The Missionary-Ethnological Museum, founded in 1926, holds gifts that reached the pope from all over the world.
Don't miss
• The Sistine Chapel.
• The Raphael Rooms.
• The Laocoön and the Apollo Belvedere.
• The Gallery of Maps.
Did you know?
• The museums are in the Vatican, but the entrance is on Italian soil.
• The 1929 Treaty forbids the Holy See to sell the museums' possessions and obliges it to keep them open to visitors.
• The Sistine measures 40.93 by 13.41 meters: the dimensions of Solomon's Temple, as the Old Testament gives them.