Vatican Museums

The Vatican Museums hold the art gathered by the papacy over centuries, and their story opens with a single find in the ground. In January 1506 a marble group came to light in a Roman vineyard, and the pope sent two men then at work in the Vatican, the architect Giuliano da Sangallo and Michelangelo, to look at what had been dug up. Soon afterwards the pope founded the museums themselves. What they had found was the Laocoön, a Trojan priest and his two sons in the coils of sea serpents, put on public display in the Vatican exactly one month later. The Roman writer Pliny had praised the group as Greek work of the highest order, naming sculptors' hands but no date.

The classical marbles began in the Octagonal Court, a courtyard once called the Cortile delle Statue, and the sculpture collected by Julius II still forms the core of the pontifical holdings. Later popes built on that core: Clement XIV and Pius VI founded the Pio Clementino Museum, Pius VII brought in the Chiaramonti Museum with its New Wing, and Gregory XVI opened three museums at once, the Etruscan, the Egyptian and the Lateran. The Gregorian Egyptian Museum he set up in 1839 fills nine rooms around a broad hemicycle. A new Pinacoteca followed in 1932, built by the architect Luca Beltrami, and the visitor route now ends in the Sistine Chapel.

The Sistine Chapel was built for Pope Sixtus IV between 1477 and 1480, and its walls were frescoed by the leading painters of the day, among them Botticelli, Ghirlandaio, Perugino and Cosimo Rosselli. Julius II then asked Michelangelo to paint the vault, which he did between 1508 and 1512 in nine scenes from Genesis, a scheme that became a cornerstone of High Renaissance art, and he came back decades later for the Last Judgement on the altar wall. It is still where the cardinals gather to elect a new pope.

One floor up, the four rooms called the Stanze di Raffaello formed part of the papal apartment, and Raphael began painting them for the same pope. The School of Athens, painted between 1509 and 1511, gathers the philosophers of antiquity under one vault with Plato and Aristotle at the centre; the Parnassus carries the wall of poetry, and the Mass at Bolsena and the Liberation of Saint Peter decorate the next room. A long gallery of maps painted for Gregory XIII by Ignazio Danti leads towards the chapel on the modern route.