For our second day in Rome we had pre-booked to see the Vatican Museums, the Sistine Chapel and St. Peter's. Thank goodness we did pre-book...the queue for the Vatican Museums was 4 hours long!!
The Vatican Museums display works collected by popes throughout the centuries including several of the most renowned Roman sculptures and most important masterpieces of Renaissance art in the world. The museums contain roughly 70,000 works, of which 20,000 are on display. There are 54 galleries, with the Sistine Chapel being the very last gallery within the Museum. It is one of the largest museums in the world.
In the museums you move with the crowd from gallery to gallery. Besides the paintings/sculptures on display in each gallery, the floors and ceilings are also beautifully decorated and it is absolutely impossible to take in everything you see, so you have to pick out your favourite things and concentrate on those.
Perseus with the head of Medusa by Antonio Canova
The statue of Laocoön and His Sons, also called the Laocoön Group has been one of the most famous ancient sculptures ever since it was excavated in Rome in 1506 and placed on public display in the Vatican.
The Belvedere Torso is a fragmentary marble statue of a nude male, known to be in Rome from the 1430s, and signed prominently on the front of the base by "Apollonios, son of Nestor, Athenian". It is believed to be a copy from the 1st century BC or AD of an older statue, which probably dated to the early 2nd century BC. Legend has it that Pope Julius II requested that Michelangelo complete the statue with arms, legs and a face. He respectfully declined, stating that it was too beautiful to be altered, and instead used it as the inspiration for several of the figures in the Sistine Chapel.
One of the most impressive galleries has to be the Gallery of Maps which extends for 120 meters and houses the largest group of geographical paintings ever created. It contains a series of painted maps of Italy based on drawings by friar and geographer Ignazio Danti. The gallery was commissioned in 1580 by Pope Gregory XIII and it took Danti three years (1580–1583) to complete the 40 panels. However, it's the ceiling which really catches the eye! These colorful works show scenes from the history of Rome and the early Papacy and seem to go on forever! It is impossible to convey the scale and opulence of this room in photographs!
The School of Athens is a fresco by the Italian Renaissance artist Raphael. It was painted between 1509 and 1511 as a part of Raphael's commission to decorate the rooms now known as the Stanze di Raffaello. The picture has long been seen as "Raphael's masterpiece and the perfect embodiment of the classical spirit of the Renaissance".
Dispuation of the Holy Sacrament, also by Raphael.
The Museums also contain a sizable collection of modern religious art, including works by Francis Bacon, Marc Chagall, Salvador Dalí, Paul Gauguin, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Pablo Picasso, and Vincent van Gogh. My favourite was the Matisse Chapel, a space for the display of Matisse's full-sized studies and designs for the Chapelle du Saint-Marie du Rosaire in the French Riviera town of Vence. These include magnificent, 5-meter high paper cutout collages in green, yellow and blue that served as the models for the chapel's stained glass windows, a massive line drawing of a Madonna and Child, and ecclesiastical robes designed by Matisse.
The last stop in the Vatican Museums is the Sistine Chapel. Unfortunately you are not allowed to take photos in here so you will have to use your imagination!
Again, it is impossible to describe these masterpieces but this quote from Johann Wolfgang Goethe just about says it all, "Without having seen the Sistine Chapel one can form no appreciable idea of what one man is capable of achieving."
Today, the chapel is the site of the Papal conclave, the process by which a new pope is selected. It is famous for its frescoes by Michelangelo - the Sistine Chapel ceiling and The Last Judgment. The ceiling was completed between 1508 and 1512, and is about 40m long by 13m wide. This means that Michelangelo painted well over 460m2 of frescoes...on his back. His figures (of which there are more than 300), showed the Creation, Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, and the Great Flood.
He painted the Last Judgment, over the altar, between 1535 and 1541. The painting depicts the second coming of Christ on the Day of Judgment as described in the Revelation of John. There was a bitter dispute between Cardinal Carafa and Michelangelo because he had depicted naked figures in a sacred place. He was accused of immorality and obscenity and the offending genitalia were later covered by the artist Daniele da Volterra, whom history remembers by the derogatory nickname "Il Braghettone" ("the breeches-painter").
To exit the Vatican Museums you descend via the double helix staircase, commonly referred to as the "Bramante Staircase". This staircase is a double helix, having two staircases allowing people to ascend and descend without meeting. It encircles the outer wall of a stairwell approximately fifteen meters wide and with a clear space at the centre.
And here endeth the history lesson...for now!
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