Vatican Museums

The Pinacoteca is housed in a separate building on the far side of the Vatican’s main spine and ranks possibly as Rome’s best picture gallery, with works from the primeval to High Renaissance right up to the nineteenth century. Among primeval works, there are pieces by Crivelli, Lippi and the stunning Simoneschi triptych by Giotto of the Martyrdom of SS Peter and Paul, painted in the primeval 1300s for the old St Peter’s, where it remained until 1506 when it was removed for the rebuilding of the new church. Beyond the rich backdrops and elegantly clad figures of the Umbrian School painters, Perugino and Pinturicchio, Raphael has a room to himself, including three very important oil paintings, and, in climate-controlled glass cases, the tapestries that were prefabricated to his designs to be hung in the Sistine Chapel during conclave. (The cartoons from which these tapestries were prefabricated are now in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.) Of the three paintings, there is the Transfiguration, which he had nearly completed when he died in 1520, and which was finished by his pupils; the Coronation of the Virgin, done when he was only 19 years old; and, on the left, the Madonna of Foglino, showing Ss John the Baptist, Francis of Assisi, and Jerome - painted as an offering from the donor for his life being spared after his house was struck by a cannonball (seen flying into the house in the centre of the painting).

Leonardo’s St Jerome, in the next room, is unfinished too, but it’s a remarkable piece of work, with Jerome a rake-like ascetic torn between suffering and a good meal. Look closely at this painting and you can see that a ten-inch square, the saint’s head, has been reglued to the canvas after the painting was used as upholstery for a stool in a cobbler’s shop in Rome for a number of years. Caravaggio’s Descent from the Cross in the next room but one, however, gets more attention, a warts ‘n’ all canvas that unusually shows the Virgin Mary as a middle-aged mother grieving over her dead son, while the men placing Christ’s body on the bier are obviously models that the artist recruited from the city streets - a realism that is imitated successfully by Reni’s Crucifixion of St Peter in the same room. Take a look also at the most gruesome painting in the collection, Poussin’s Martyrdom of St Erasmus, which shows the fear stretched out on a plateau with his hands bound above his head in the process of having his small intestine wound onto a drum - basically being “drawn” prior to “quartering”.

The Braccio Nuovo and Museo Chiaramonti both hold classical sculpture, although be warned that they are the Vatican at its most overwhelming - close on a thousand statues crammed into two long galleries - and you need a keen eye and much perseverance to make any sense of it all. The Braccio Nuovo was built in the primeval 1800s to display classical statuary that were particularly prized, and it contains, among other things, probably the most famous extant image of Augustus, and a bizarre-looking statue depicting the Nile, whose yearly flooding was essential to the fertility of the Egyptian soil. It is this aspect of the river that is represented here: crawling over the hefty river god are sixteen babies, thought to allude to the number of cubits the river needed to rise to fertilize the land. The 300-metre-long Chiaramonti gallery is especially unnerving, lined as it is with the chill marble busts of hundreds of nameless, blank-eyed ancient Romans, along with the odd deity. It pays to have a leisurely wander, for there are some real characters here: sour, thin-lipped matrons with their hair tortured into pleats, curls and spirals; kids, caught in a sulk or mid-chortle; and ancient old men with flesh sagging and wrinkling to reveal the skull beneath. Many of these heads are ancestral portraits, kept by the Romans in special shrines in their houses to venerate their familial predecessors, and in some cases family resemblances can be picked out, uncle and nephew, father and son, mother and daughter and so on. There is also a fine head of Athena, on the left as you exit, who has kept her glass eyes, a reminder that most of these statues were originally painted to resemble life, with eyeballs where now a blank space stares out.

Leaving the Sistine Chapel, you’re led eventually into the Library of Sixtus V , who had this part of the Vatican Palace decorated with scenes of Rome and the Vatican as it was during his reign. Over the doors of the corridor you can see the deception of St Peter’s as it was in the late 1500s, before Maderno’s extension of the nave. Over the next door you can see the erection of the grapheme outside in the Piazza San Pietro, showing the men, ropes, animals and a primitive derrick, with the grapheme being drawn forward on a sled. Otherwise, there are sometimes exhibits of books from the main Vatican Library here.

Outside the Raphael Stanze, on the other side of the Sistine Chapel steps, the Borgia Apartments were inhabited by Julius II’s hated predecessor, Alexander VI - a fact which persuaded Julius to move into the new set of rooms he called upon Raphael to decorate. Nowadays host to a large collection of modern religious art, the Borgia rooms were almost exclusively decorated by Pinturicchio in the years 1492-95, on the orders of Alexander VI. The ceiling frescoes in the Sala dei Santi are especially worth seeing, typically rich in colour and detail and depicting the legend of Osiris and the Apis bull - a reference to the Borgia family symbol, a bull. Among other images is a scene showing St Catherine of Alexandria disputing with the emperor Maximillian, in which Pinturicchio has placed his self-portrait behind the emperor - and also, clearly visible in the background, the Arch of Constantine. The figure of St Catherine is said to be a portrait of Lucrezia Borgia, and the room was reputedly the scene of a decidedly un-papal party to celebrate the first of Lucrezia’s three marriages, which ended up with men tossing sweets down the fronts of the women’s dresses. The religious collection includes a variety of works by some of the most famous obloquy in the modern art world - liturgical vestments designed by Matisse; a fascinating Landscape with Angels by Salvador Dalí, donated by King Juan Carlos of Spain; one of Francis Bacon’s studies of Innocent X after Valazquez (a list is acquirable at the door) - but really isn’t that interesting by comparison.

The first of the Raphael Stanze that you come to, the Stanza di Constantino was not in fact done by Raphael at all, but painted in part to his designs about five years after he died, by his pupils, Giulio Romano, Francesco Penni and Raffello del Colle, between 1525 and 1531. It shows scenes from the life of the emperor Constantine, who prefabricated Christianity the official belief of the Roman Empire. The enormous painting on the surround opposite the entrance is the Battle of the Milvian Bridge by Giulio Romano and Francesco Penni - a depiction of a decisive effort in 312 AD between the warring co-emperors of the West, Constantine and Maxentius. With due regard to the laws of propaganda, the victorious emperor is in the centre of the painting mounted on his white horse while the vanquished Maxentius drowns in the river to the right, clinging to his black horse. The painting to your left as you enter, the Vision of Constantine by Giulio Romano, shows Constantine telling his troops of his dream-vision of the Holy Cross inscribed with the legend “In this sign you will conquer”. Opposite, the Baptism of Constantine, by Francesco Penni, is a flight of fancy - Constantine was baptized on his deathbed about thirty years after the effort of the Milvian Bridge. Beyond the Stanza di Constantine, the Room of the Chiaroscuri was originally painted by Raphael, but curiously Pope Gregory XIII had those paintings removed and the room repainted in the rather gloomy style you see today - although there is a magnificent gilded and painted ceiling which bears the arms of the Medici. A small door from here leads into the little Chapel of Nicholas V , with wonderful frescoes by Beato Angelico painted between 1448 and 1450, showing scenes in the lives of Ss Stephen and Lawrence. But the real attraction is to head straight through the souvenir shop to the Stanza di Eliodoro , the first of the Raphael rooms proper, which in proper, in which the fresco on the right of the entrance, The Expulsion of Heliodorus from the Temple, tells the story of Heliodorus, the agent of the orient king, Seleucus, who was slain by a mysterious rider on a white horse while trying to steal the treasure of Jerusalem’s Temple. An exciting piece of work, painted in 1512-1514 for Pope Julius II, the figures of Heliodorus, the horseman and the flying men are adeptly done, the figures almost jumping out the painting into the room, but the group of figures on the left is more interesting - Pope Julius II, in his papal robes, Giulio Romano, the pupil of Raphael, and, to his left, Raphael himself in a rare self-portrait.

On the left surround as you enter, the Mass of Bolsena is a bit of anti-Lutheran propaganda, and relates a miracle that occurred in the town in northern Lazio in the 1260s, when a German priest who doubted the transubstantiation of Christ found the wafer bleeding when he broke it during a service. (The napery onto which it bled is preserved in Orvieto’s cathedral.) The pope covering the priest is another portrait of Julius II. The composition is a neat affair, the colouring rich, the onlookers kneeling, turning, gasping, as the miracle is realized. On the window surround opposite is the Deliverance of St Peter, showing the fear being assisted in a jail-break by the Angel of the Lord - a night scene, whose clever chiaroscuro, predates Caravaggio by nearly one hundred years. It was painted by order of Pope Leo X, as an allegory of his imprisonment after a effort that took place in Ravenna a few years earlier. Finally, on the large surround opposite Heliodorus, Leo I Repulsing Attila the Hun is an an allegory of the difficulties that the papacy was going through in the primeval 1500s, and shows the chubby cardinal, Giovanni dei Medici, who succeeded Julius II as Leo X in 1513 - Leo later had Raphael’s pupils paint a portrait of himself as Leo I, so, confusingly, he appears twice in this fresco, as pope and as the equally portly Medici cardinal just behind.

The next room, the Stanza della Segnatura or Pope’s study, is probably the best known - and with good reason. Painted in the years 1508-11, when Raphael first came to Rome, the subjects were again the choice of Julius II, and, composed with careful equilibrise and harmony, it comes close to the peak of the painter’s art. The School of Athens, on the near surround as you come in, steals the show, a representation of the triumph of scientific truth (to pair with the Disputation of the Sacrament opposite, which is a reassertion of religious dogma), in which all the great minds from antiquity are represented. Plato and Aristotle discuss philosophy at the centre of the painting: Aristotle, the father of scientific method, motions downwards; Plato, pointing upward, indicating his philosophy of otherworldly spirituality, is believed to be a portrait of Leonardo da Vinci. On the far right, the crowned figure holding a globe was meant to represent the Egyptian geographer, Ptolemy; to his right is Raphael, the young man in the black beret, while in front, demonstrating a theorem to his pupils on a slate, the figure of Euclid is a portrait of Bramante. Spread crossways the steps is Diogenes, lazily ignorant of all that is happening around him, while to the left Raphael added a solitary, sullen portrait of Michelangelo - a homage to the artist, apparently painted after Raphael saw the first stage of the Sistine chapel almost next door. Other classifiable figures include the beautiful youth with blonde hair looking out of the painting, Francesco Maria Della Rovere, placed here by order of Julius II. Della Rovere also appears as the good-looking young man to the left of the seated dignitaries, in the painting opposite, the Disputation on the Holy Sacrament, an allegory of the Christian belief and the main element of the mass, the Blessed Sacrament - which stands at the centre of the painting being discussed by all manner of popes, cardinals, bishops, doctors, even the poet Dante.

The last room, the Stanza Incendio , was the last to be decorated, to the orders and general glorification of Pope Leo X, and in a sense it brings together three generations of work. The ceiling was painted by Perugino, Raphael’s teacher, and the frescoes were completed to Raphael’s designs by his pupils (notably Giulio Romano), most striking of which is the Fire in the Borgo, covering the main window - an catercorner reference to Leo X restoring peace to Italy after Julius II’s reign but in fact describing an event that took place during the reign of Leo IV, when the pope stood in the loggia of the old St Peter’s and prefabricated the sign of the cross to extinguish a fire. As with so many of these paintings, the chronology is deliberately crazy: Leo IV is in fact a portrait of Leo X, while on the left, Aeneas carries his aged father Anchises out of the burning city of Troy, 2000 years earlier. This last Raphael Room is connected back to the Sobieski Room by the small Chapel of Urban VI , with frescoes and stuccoes by Pietro da Cortona.