VATICAN MUSEUMS

Description

Essentials about the Vatican Museums in brief

Not only Vatican fans and art lovers should take the opportunity during a trip to Rome to pay a visit to the Vatican Museums. There you will find probably the most important art collection in the world. As the name suggests, the Vatican Museums are not a single museum, but a whole complex of various collections housed in different parts of the Vatican Palace.

The collection of the Vatican Museums

The collection includes Oriental antiquities (Ancient Egypt and Assyria), Classical antiquities (Greco-Roman art), Etruscan-Italian antiquities (present-day pre-Roman Italy), early Christian and medieval art (3rd-14th centuries), art from the Renaissance (15th century) to the 19th century, contemporary art, and an ethnological collection. Probably the most famous part, which can be visited during a visit to the Vatican Museums, is the Sistine Chapel.

The history of the Vatican Museums

The museums were born at the beginning of the 16th century under the Renaissance Pope Julius II, who energetically promoted his posthumous fame as a generous patron. His collection of magnificent sculptures forms the core of the Vatican art collection. Many of his successors were infected by his passion for collecting and added to existing collections or provided new exhibition space, transferring works of art scattered throughout the city to the Vatican museum complex.

In addition to the actual collections, which were fed by found objects, gifts or excavated objects, there were countless top-class works of art created by the Italian artistic elite at the request of the popes. Under the patronage of two 18th century popes, Clement XIV (1769-1774) and Pius VI (1775-1799), the Vatican Museums were particularly expanded and opened to the public for the first time.

The departments of the Vatican Museums

General information

The collections of the Vatican Museums are very diverse and comprehensive. With hundreds of rooms and an estimated 50,000 exhibits over a distance of seven to eight kilometers, which would have to be covered if one wanted to walk through all the halls, it is advisable to decide in advance on which areas one wants to focus. One should also not make the mistake of wanting to combine the museum visit with a tour of St. Peter’s Square and St. Peter’s Basilica. That would go beyond any time frame.

Pio-Clementino Museum

The Museo Pio-Clementino attracts many visitors with its extensive and world-famous sculpture collection. On display are colossal statues and portrait heads of gods, emperors and heroes. The Belvedere Torso, admired by Michelangelo for its anatomical accuracy, is on display here, as is the undressed Venus of Knidos, the Apollo of Belvedere in youthful beauty, and the famous Laocoon group.

Chiaramonti Museum

The Museo Chiaramonti also houses a beautiful large sculpture collection with many hundreds of statues of emperors and gods. Outstanding works among the Roman statues and copies of Greek originals exhibited here are the best preserved representation of the first Roman emperor, Augustus, in the pose of the ruler of the world, a copy of the famous Doryphoros (spearman) after the bronze original of Polyklet, creator of this “epitome of the Greek statue” and in a large circular niche impresses the huge sculpture of the personified river god Nile.

Gregoriano Egiziano Museum

The Gregorian Egyptian Museum was founded in 1839 by Pope Gregory XVI, who had a keen interest in Egypt. The art objects in this museum range from stelae and hieroglyphs from about 2500 B.C. to Roman replicas of Egyptian statues from the 2nd century A.D. Not to be missed is the collection of mummies from about 1000 B.C. found in the Necropolis of Deir el-Bahari in Thebes.

Gregoriano Etrusco Museum

The Gregorian-Etruscan Museum was also founded by Gregory XVI. Here are exhibited utensils from the pre-Roman period such as a collection of terracotta vases. The highlight of the collection is a set of objects found in a necropolis, among them a throne and a chariot.

The Vatican Painting Collection

The Vatican Painting Collection, one of the newer museums – opened in 1932 – displays Italian paintings and tapestries from the 11th-19th centuries with mainly Christian pictorial themes. As a papal collection of paintings, the Vatican Painting Collection presents important works of the Renaissance and Baroque, e.g. by Giotto, Fra Angelico, Perugino, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Titian, Federico Barocci, Caravaggio, Guido Reni, Carlo Maratta and Johann Wenzel Peter.

The Missionary Ethnological Museum

Founded by Pius XI in 1926, the Missionary Ethnological Museum has objects of a religious nature from four geographical regions – Asia, Oceania, Africa and the Americas. The collection of this museum includes an incredible 80,000 exhibits.

Other museums

Other places to visit include the Collezione d’Arte Religiosa Moderna, a collection of modern religious art; the Museo Storico Vaticano, the Vatican’s history museum; the Musei della Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, the Vatican Library museums; and the Museo Pio Cristiano, a collection of early Christian art.

The Stanze di Raffaelo

To list all the collections of the Vatican Museums in detail would go far too far at this point. However, one last highlight in the Vatican museum landscape should be mentioned. It is the Stanze di Raffaelo, the apartments of Pope Julius II, painted by Raphael. Raphael had a free hand in the execution of his frescoes. Thus, between 1508 and 1524, the master of high Renaissance painting completed a thematically varied painting program, from the coronation of Charlemagne and the theological dispute over the sacrament of the altar to the famous “Scuola d’Atene” (School of Athens), where he unites the leading heads of science in the picture, and the fresco entitled “Parnassus”, which shows poets and musicians with their muses.