Italy Travel & Hotel Guide

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”.

Category: Vatican Museums