Musei Vaticani

Papal patronage assembled one of the densest art complexes on earth along Viale Vaticano: courtyards filled with classical sculpture, corridors frescoed end to end, and Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel closing the route. Five centuries of collecting decisions built the Holy See's museum chain.

Why it matters

No other museum in Rome compresses so much art history into a single walk. The collections began as the popes' personal sculpture garden and grew into a chain of purpose-built museums: classical statuary, Etruscan and Egyptian antiquities, tapestries, maps, the papal picture gallery and rooms painted by Raphael and Michelangelo. The museums' own history page traces the sequence from the Octagonal Court, where the sculpture collection took shape under Julius II and Leo X, through the Pio Clementino Museum founded by Clement XIV and Pius VI, to the Chiaramonti and the New Wing under Pius VII, the Etruscan, Egyptian and Lateran museums under Gregory XVI, the new Pinacoteca under Pius XI and the Collection of Contemporary Art inaugurated by Paul VI in 1973. You are not visiting a building; you are walking through five centuries of collecting decisions.

What to notice

Michelangelo's ceiling and Last Judgement are among the most consequential paintings ever made. The Octagonal Court preserves the ancient sculptures that started the whole enterprise. The Gallery of Maps runs the length of a long corridor with sixteenth-century painted views of Italian territories. The Raphael Rooms hold the papal apartment frescoes that established Raphael's reputation. The Borgia Apartment, decorated for Alexander VI by Pinturicchio and his workshop, was only opened to the public at the end of the nineteenth century, a late date that surprises many visitors. The Pinacoteca hangs works by Giotto, Leonardo, Raphael and Caravaggio.

Context and history

The institution grew by accretion rather than by decree. A single ancient sculpture acquired in the early sixteenth century set the pattern of papal collecting, and each century added its own museum wing to the palaces on the Vatican hill. By the eighteenth century the popes were displaying their antiquities publicly, and the Pio Clementino became the model for how Europe would later present classical art. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries broadened the scope far beyond the classical: missionary ethnography, religious archaeology and modern and contemporary art all found rooms here, which is why a visit can move from an Egyptian tomb chamber to a van Gogh in a quarter of an hour. The museums belong to the Holy See, not to the Italian state.