Musei Vaticani (Vatican Museums)
The Sistine Chapel is here, as are papal apartments, frescoed by the greatest artists of the Renaissance. But before and after reaching these sights you walk through corridors and rooms full of other works, from frescoes and tapestries to old maps and clocks. And along the way many museums tempt you: There are five alone on classical sculpture, not including the Etruscan collections; others are as diversified as the Egyptian, Modern Religious Art, and ethnographic collections. For a breather, tour the Vatican Gardens, almost 24.5 hectares (60 acres) of lush woods, flowers, paths, fountains, and Pope Pius IV's summer house.To help organize the flow of visitors, the Vatican has developed four different color-coded paths through the collections. All go through the Sistine Chapel, and all have access to the Pinacoteca. On a first visit, you probably will want to limit the number of collections you explore along your walk. Keys to the works are found on the walls of most rooms. Allow two to five hours just to take in the highlights.
There are museum shops, cloakrooms (free), and a cafeteria, as well as headset guides (fee) to the Raphael Rooms and the Sistine Chapel. No flashes are permitted on cameras.
Pio-Clementine Museum
This first-floor museum of classical sculpture, the first you encounter, contains a number of exceptional Greek and Roman works. Many of these pieces had immense influence on later Renaissance and Baroque artists. The octagonal courtyard contains exquisite works, including two masterpieces: The elegant Apollo Belvedere, a 2nd-century Roman copy of a 4th-century BC Greek bronze; and the tormented Laocoön fighting off the snakes Athena sent to kill him and his sons.
Stanze di Raffaelo
On the second floor are the apartments of Julius II. Called the "Raphael Rooms," they contain that artist's greatest works produced while in Rome. However, you visit them in the reverse order of their development, and, in fact, enter by the Sala di Costantino, painted after Raphael's death (by Giulio Romano), and then enter yet another room in which his frescoes were painted over. As compensation for the loss, the earlier Cappella del Beato (aka Cappella Nicolina) is preserved through a door here—a tiny chapel decorated by Fra Angelico (1448).
After the refreshing delicacy of these Early Renaissance works, you plunge into the tumult of Raphael's late style, found in the Stanza d'Elidoro (1512–13). The second of his masterful rooms, this one shows his rapid development from the quintessential High Renaissance painting Miracle of Bolseno, with its rich Raphael colors and symmetry, to the more powerfully dramatic one opposite (Freeing of Peter, famous for its play with light—from the natural glow of the sky to the spiritual), and the practically Baroque, almost Rubenesque, ones to the sides. The first room, the Stanza della Segnatura (1508–11), is the culmination of the classical painting style of the High Renaissance, full of spatial harmony, serene and static. Raphael's change in style in the two stanze is attributed to his first exposure (1511) to Michelangelo's Sistine Ceiling. In the most famous painting here, the School of Athens, Raphael recorded this experience by the late addition of a portrait of Michelangelo (the brooding figure seated in front of the steps, to the left). On the extreme right is Raphael next to Sodoma (dressed in white); Leonardo is portrayed as Plato (finger pointing up). All the walls, as well as the ceiling medallions, were painted by Raphael himself.
Sistine Chapel
On the ceiling, Michelangelo, who never before had used the fresco technique, created what many consider the greatest painting ever produced. From 1508 to 1512, he stood on scaffolding, craning his neck, to create an elaborate work based on Old Testament scenes, from the Creation to Noah's salvation. Surrounding them are extraordinary figures of prophets and sibyls. All are now revealed in their original luminous colors after 14 years of cleaning, completed in 1994. Binoculars are very helpful for viewing the details.
Michelangelo began his monumental task near the entrance, and ended over the altar, behind which rises his later work The Last Judgment. Somewhere midway, experts agree that the great sculptor became more assured with his new technique, leaving behind the too-small scenes of the Flood, and producing his more famous heroic and highly expressive figures, none more famous than the Creation of Adam. The Last Judgment (1536) was painted in an era of despair in Italy, after the sack of Rome. Restored in 1994 to its original lapis blue background, the details of Michelangelo's expression of this despair now can be seen only too clearly. A stern god holds this painting together, almost as if by centrifugal force, the damned and wretched below on the right. At his feet is St. Bartholomew holding a flayed skin, in which Michelangelo has painted his own, distorted face.
Pinacoteca
You can visit painting galleries at either the beginning or end of your tour, since the entrance is on the courtyard of the cafeteria, where you enter and exit the above galleries. The show-stopper is the Angel Musicians (Room IV), detached frescoes by the relatively unknown Melozzo da Forli (1538–94). The end room (VIII) contains only Raphaels, including one of his first works, Coronation of the Virgin (1503), and his last, the Transfiguration (1520), so much more monumental and theatrical and brilliant with color. In Room IX is the unfinished but riveting St. Jerome (1480) by Leonardo and a Pieta (1474) by Giovanni Bellini, while the 16th-century paintings in Room X include Veronese's Sant'Elena. Room XII holds Caravaggio's Deposition.
Address:
Viale Vaticano
Rome
Italy
Telephone: +39 (6) 698-3333