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Musei Vaticani Review

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Musei Vaticani

Fodor's Review:

Other than the pope and his papal court, the occupants of the Vatican are some of the most famous art works in the world. The museums that contain them are part of the Vatican Palace, residence of the popes since 1377. The palace consists of a number of individual buildings containing an estimated 1,400 rooms, chapels, and galleries. The pope and his household occupy only a small part of the palace, most of the rest of which is given over to the Vatican Library and Museums. Beyond the glories of the Sistine Chapel, the collection is so extraordinarily rich you may just wish to skim the surface, but few will want to miss out on the great antique sculptures, the Raphael Stanze, and Old Master paintings, such as Leonardo da Vinci's St. Jerome.

Among the collections on the way to the chapel, the Egyptian Museum (in which Room II reproduces an underground chamber tomb of the Valley of Kings) is well worth a stop. The Chiaramonti Museum was organized by the Neoclassical sculptor Canova and contains almost 1,000 copies of classical sculpture. The gems of the Vatican's sculpture collection are in the Pio-Clementino Museum, however. Just off the hall in Room X, you can find the Apoxyomenos (Scraper), a beautiful 1st-century AD copy of a bronze statue of an athlete. There are other even more famous pieces in the Octagonal Courtyard, where Pope Julius II installed the greatest pieces from his private collection: on the left stands the celebrated Apollo Belvedere. In the far corner, on the same side of the courtyard, is the Laocoön group, found on Rome's Esquiline Hill in 1506, held to be possibly the single most important antique sculpture group in terms of its influence on Renaissance artists.

An adjacent hall dedicated to animals is filled with sculpture and mosaics done in colored marble, some of them very charming. There's a gallery of classical statues and a Gallery of Busts; the smallish Mask Room displays a lively mosaic pavement from the emperor Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli just outside Rome, and a copy of the 4th-century BC Greek sculptor Praxiteles' Cnidian Venus. In the Hall of the Muses, the Belvedere Torso occupies center stage: this is a fragment of a 1st-century BC statue, probably of Hercules, all rippling muscles and classical dignity, much admired by Michelangelo. The lovely neoclassical room of the Rotonda has an ancient mosaic pavement and a huge porphyry basin from Nero's palace, as well as several colossal statues. The room on the Greek-cross plan contains two fine porphyry sarcophagi (great marble burial caskets), one of Costantia and one of St. Helena, mother of the emperor Constantine.

Upstairs, the Etruscan Museum holds many objects from the Regolini-Galassi find near Cerveteri, and a wealth of other material as well. Adjacent are three sections of limited interest: the Antiquarium, with Roman originals; three small rooms of Greek originals (followed by a broad staircase lined with Assyrian reliefs); and a vase collection. The domed Sala della Biga comes next. The biga (chariot) group at the center was extensively reconstructed in 1780. The chariot itself is original and was used in the church of San Marco as an episcopal throne.

In the Candelabra Gallery, the tall candelabra -- immense candlesticks -- under the arches are, like the sarcophagi and vases, of ancient origin. The walls facing the windows of the Tapestry Gallery are hung with magnificent tapestries executed in Brussels in the 16th century from designs by Raphael. On the window walls are tapestries illustrating the life of Pope Urban VIII. They were done in a workshop that the Barberini family set up in Rome in the 17th century expressly for this purpose.

The long Gallery of Maps is frescoed with 40 maps of Italy and the papal territories, commissioned by Pope Gregory XIII in 1580. On each map is a detailed plan of the region's principal city. The ceiling is decorated with episodes from the history of the regions.

In the Apartment of Pius V is a small hall hung with tapestries. Facing the windows are the precious 15th-century Passion and Baptism of Christ from Tournai, in Belgium. The Sobieski Room gets its name from a huge painting by the Polish artist Matejko. It shows the Victory of Vienna, a decisive defeat of the invading Ottoman forces in the late 17th century. A massive display case in the Hall of the Immaculate Conception shows some preciously bound volumes containing the text of the papal bull promulgating that particular dogma.

Rivaling the Sistine Chapel for artistic interest are the Stanze di Raffaello (Raphael Rooms), which are directly over the Borgia apartments and can be very crowded. Pope Julius II moved into this suite of rooms in 1507, four years after his election. Reluctant to continue living in the Borgia apartments with their memories of his ill-famed predecessor, Alexander VI, he called in Raphael to decorate his new quarters. When people talk about the Italian High Renaissance -- thought to be the very pinnacle of Western art -- it's Raphael's frescoes they're probably thinking about. The theme of the Segnatura Room, the first to be frescoed, was painted almost entirely by Raphael himself (as opposed to the other rooms, which were painted in large part by his assistants). The theme of the room -- which may broadly be said to be "enlightenment" -- reflects the fact that this was Julius's private library.

Theology triumphs in the fresco known as the Disputa, or Debate on the Holy Sacrament, on the wall behind you as you enter. Opposite, the School of Athens glorifies philosophy in its greatest exponents. Plato (perhaps a portrait of Leonardo da Vinci), in the center, is debating a point with Aristotle. The pensive figure on the stairs is thought to be modeled after Michelangelo, who was painting the Sistine ceiling at the same time Raphael was working here. Michelangelo does not appear in preparatory drawings, so Raphael may have added his fellow artist's portrait after admiring his work. In the foreground on the right are Euclid, the architect Bramante, and, on the far right, the handsome youth just behind the white-clad older man is Raphael himself. Over the window on the left are Parnassus, who represents poetry, and Apollo, the Muses, and famous poets, many of whom are likenesses of Raphael's contemporaries. In the lunette over the window opposite, Raphael painted figures representing and alluding to the Cardinal and Theological Virtues, and subjects showing the establishment of written codes of law. Beautiful personifications of the four subject areas, Theology, Poetry, Philosophy, and Jurisprudence, are painted in circular pictures on the ceiling above.

All the revolutionary characteristics of High Renaissance art are here: naturalism (Raphael's figures lack the awkwardness that pictures painted only a few years earlier still contained); humanism (the idea that man is the most noble and admirable of God's creatures); and a profound interest in the ancient world, the result of the 15th-century rediscovery of archaeology and classical antiquity. There's a tendency to go into something of a stupor when confronted with "great art" of this kind. The fact remains that the frescoes in this room virtually dared its occupants to aspire to the hightest ideas of law and learning -- an amazing feat for an artist not yet 30.

The first in the series is the Incendio Room; it was the last to be painted in Raphael's lifetime, and was executed mainly by Giulio Romano, who worked from Raphael's drawings for the new pope, Leo X. It served as the pope's dining room. The frescoes depict stories of previous popes called Leo, the best of them showing the great fire in the Borgo (the neighborhood between the Vatican and Castel Sant'Angelo), which threatened to destroy the original St. Peter's Basilica in AD 847; miraculously, Pope Leo IV extinguished it with the sign of the cross. The other frescoes show the coronation of Charlemagne by Leo III in St. Peter's Basilica, the Oath of Leo III, and a naval battle with the Saracens at Ostia in AD 849, after which Pope Leo IV showed clemency to the defeated.

The Eliodoro Room is a private antechamber. Working on the theme of Divine Providence's miraculous intervention in defense of endangered faith, Raphael depicted Leo the Great's encounter with Attila; it's on the wall to your left as you enter. The Expulsion of Heliodorus from the Temple of Jerusalem, opposite the entrance, refers to Pope Julius II's insistence on the Church's right to temporal possessions. He appears on the left, watching the scene. On the left window wall, the Liberation of St. Peter is one of Raphael's best-known and most effective works.

Adjacent to the Raphael Rooms, the Hall of Constantine was decorated by Giulio Romano and other assistants of Raphael after the master's untimely death in 1520. The frescoes represent various scenes from the life of the emperor Constantine. Don't miss the tiny Chapel of Nicholas V, aglow with Fra Angelico (1395-1455) frescoes of episodes from the life of St. Stephen (above) and St. Lawrence (below), one of the greatest gems of Renaissance art. If it weren't under the same roof as Raphael's and Michelangelo's works, it would undoubtedly draw greater attention.

Returning downstairs, you enter the Borgia apartments, where some intriguing historic figures are depicted in the elaborately painted ceilings, designed but only partially executed by Pinturicchio at the end of the 15th century, and greatly retouched in later centuries. It's generally believed that Cesare Borgia murdered his sister Lucrezia's husband, Alphonse of Aragon, in the Room of the Sibyl. In the Room of the Saints, Pinturicchio painted his self-portrait in the figure to the left of the possible portrait of the architect Antonio da Sangallo. (His profession is made clear by the fact that he holds a T-square.) The lovely picture of St. Catherine of Alexandria is said to be a representation of Lucrezia Borgia herself. The resurrection scene in the next room, the Room of the Mysteries, offers excellent portraits of the kneeling Borgia pope, of Cesare Borgia (the soldier with a lance at the center), and of the young Francesco Borgia (the Roman at the soldier's side), who also was probably assassinated by Cesare. These and the other rooms of the Borgia apartments have been given over to exhibits of the Vatican's collection of modern religious art, which continues interminably on lower levels of the building.

In the frescoed exhibition halls that are part of the Vatican Museums, the Vatican Library displays precious illuminated manuscripts and documents from its vast collections. The Aldobrandini Marriage Room contains beautiful ancient frescoes of a Roman nuptial rite, named for their subsequent owner, Cardinal Aldobrandini.

The Braccio Nuovo (New Wing) holds an additional collection of ancient Greek and Roman statues, the most famous of which is the Augustus of Prima Porta, in the fourth niche from the end on the left. It's considered a faithful likeness of the emperor Augustus, who was 40 years old at the time. Note the workmanship in the reliefs on his armor. The two gilt bronze peacocks in the gallery were in the courtyard of the original basilica of St. Peter's. Before that it's likely that they stood in the emperor Hadrian's mausoleum, today Castel Sant'Angelo. To the ancient Romans the peacock was a symbol of immortality.

The paintings in the Pinacoteca (Picture Gallery) are almost exclusively of religious subjects and are arranged in chronological order, beginning with works of the 11th and 12th centuries. Room II has a marvelous Giotto triptych, painted on both sides, which formerly stood on the high altar in the old St. Peter's. In Room III you'll see Madonnas by the Florentine 15th-century painters Fra Angelico and Filippo Lippi. The Raphael Room contains some of the master's greatest creations, including the exceptional Transfiguration, the Coronation of the Virgin, and the Foligno Madonna as well as the tapestries that Raphael designed to hang in the Sistine Chapel. The next room contains Leonardo's beautiful (though unfinished) St. Jerome and a Bellini Pietà. In the courtyard outside the Pinacoteca you can admire the reliefs from the base of the Colonna di Marco Aurelio, the column in Piazza Colonna.

In the Museo Pio Cristiano (Museum of Christian Antiquities), the most famous piece is the 3rd-century AD statue called the Good Shepherd, much reproduced as a devotional image. The Museo Missionario-Etnologico (Ethnological-Missionary Museum), usually open only Wednesday and Saturday, has artifacts from exotic places all over the world. There are some precious Asian statuettes and vases, scale models of temples, and full-scale Melanesian spirit huts. The Museo Storico (Historical Museum) displays a collection of state carriages (including an early version of the Popemobile, an ordinary car adapted to hold an armchair in the back), uniforms, arms, and banners.

  • Cost: EUR 12
  • Open: Mid-Mar.-Oct., weekdays 8:45-4:45, Sat. 8:45-2:45, last Sun. of month 8:45-1:45; Nov.-mid-Mar., Mon.-Sat. and last Sun. of month 8:45-1:45

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