Vatican Museums

• 1. Introduction

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  The Vatican Museums hold roughly 70,000 works, yet only 20,000 of them are on display at any given moment. Six hundred and forty people staff the institution across 40 departments, from conservation to scholarship. In 2024 alone, 6.8 million visitors passed through its galleries, placing it second only to the Louvre among the most-visited art museums on earth. What draws so many people to this walled city-state in Rome? And how did a single marble statue, pulled from a vineyard in 1506, set the whole thing in motion?

• 2. One Statue, One Pope

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  On the 14th of January 1506, workers digging in a vineyard near the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome uncovered something extraordinary. Pope Julius II sent two men he trusted implicitly, Giuliano da Sangallo and Michelangelo, both already employed at the Vatican, to inspect the find. They confirmed it was the Laocoön and His Sons, the ancient sculpture depicting the Trojan priest Laocoön and his sons Antiphantes and Thymbraeus being crushed by giant serpents. Julius did not hesitate. He purchased the work from the vineyard owner on the spot, and exactly one month after its discovery, placed it on public display at the Vatican. That single acquisition became the founding act of what would grow into one of the largest museum complexes in the world. The Laocoön has remained in the Octagonal Court, also called the Belvedere Courtyard, since those first years of the 1500s.

• 3. Galleries Built by Popes

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  Clement XIV conceived the idea of a dedicated museum inside Innocent VIII's Belvedere Palace and launched the refurbishment work; his successor Pius VI brought the project to completion. The result was the Museo Pio-Clementino, founded in 1771, which took its name from both pontiffs. It originally displayed works of antiquity and the Renaissance and today holds Greek and Roman sculpture arranged across rooms each designed with a distinct identity. The Sala Rotonda was shaped to evoke a miniature Pantheon, with ancient mosaics on the floor and a gilded bronze Hercules among the statues along its walls. The Greek Cross Gallery contains the porphyry sarcophagi of Constance and Saint Helena, daughter and mother of Constantine the Great. The Sala delle Muse holds a statue group of Apollo and the nine muses, unearthed in a Roman villa near Tivoli in 1774, alongside the Belvedere Torso, a fragmentary figure that Michelangelo and other Renaissance artists revered. Pius VII, whose family name before election was Chiaramonti, lent that name to a separate museum founded in the early 19th century. Its New Wing, the Braccio Nuovo, built by Raffaele Stern in the Neoclassical style, houses the Augustus of Prima Porta and the Doryphoros beneath a wide arched roof fitted with skylights.

• 4. Sistine Chapel and Raphael Rooms

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  Michelangelo's work appears twice on the standard visitor route. His painted ceiling and altar wall of the Sistine Chapel are experienced last, in the final room of the museum circuit. Raphael's contribution fills the Stanze di Raffaello, a suite of rooms decorated by the artist and his workshop. Among those works is The School of Athens, completed between 1509 and 1511. Both the Sistine Chapel and the Stanze are considered among the most canonical examples of Western and European art. Friar Ignazio Danti of Perugia painted the Gallery of Maps on commission from Gregory XIII between 1572 and 1585. The topographical maps cover the walls in a continuous pictorial survey of the whole of Italy and remain the world's largest pictorial geographical study. The Borgia Apartment, built for Pope Alexander VI, also lies along the museum's route, its walls covered in frescoes from his papacy.

• 5. Pinacoteca and Modern Art

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  The Pinacoteca Vaticana, the painting gallery, was housed in the Borgia Apartment until Pius XI ordered a separate building. The new structure, designed by Luca Beltrami, opened on the 27th of October 1932. Its collection spans centuries of European painting, from Giotto's Stefaneschi Triptych and Leonardo da Vinci's Saint Jerome in the Wilderness to Raphael's Transfiguration and Caravaggio's The Entombment of Christ. Titian, Perugino, Veronese, and Correggio all have works there, as does the Polish painter Jan Matejko with his canvas Sobieski at Vienna. A different sensibility governs the Collection of Modern Religious Art, added in 1973. Its holdings bring together work by Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, Salvador Dalí, Paul Klee, and Vincent van Gogh, among others, positioning twentieth-century masters within the museum's broader religious and artistic mission.

• 6. Incidents and Damage

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  On the 18th of August 2022, two members of the climate activist group Ultima Generazione glued their hands to the marble base of the Laocoön statue and held up a banner demanding an end to fossil fuels while a third person filmed them. Conservationists determined that the act caused permanent damage to the sculpture. Restoration works cost 3,148 euros. A Vatican court sentenced all three to nine-month suspended prison sentences and fines reaching as high as 28,000 euros, equivalent to roughly 30,000 US dollars. Less than two months later, on the 5th of October 2022, an American tourist was arrested at the Chiaramonti Museum after throwing a Roman bust and striking another. The news outlet Il Messaggero reported that the man acted in anger after learning he would not be granted an audience with Pope Francis. One bust lost part of its nose and an ear; the other was knocked entirely off its pedestal. The museum's press director Matteo Alessandrini estimated repair and conservation costs at 15,000 euros, or approximately 14,800 US dollars, and reported that the work took around 300 hours to complete.

• 7. Leadership and Milestones

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  Barbara Jatta became Director of the Vatican Museums on the 1st of January 2017, succeeding Antonio Paolucci, who had held the role since 2007. The museums had marked a significant anniversary a decade earlier, celebrating their 500th year in October 2006 by opening the excavations of a Vatican Hill necropolis to the public on a permanent basis. The Galleria Lapidaria, part of the Museo Chiaramonti, holds more than 3,000 stone tablets and inscriptions but remains off-limits to general visitors, accessible only by special permission for academic study. The Vatican Historical Museum, founded in 1973 at the direction of Paul VI, spent years in temporary quarters before moving to the main floor of the Lateran Palace, where it opened to the public in March 1991. With the Vatican Museums now registering nearly 7 million visits a year, the question of how to preserve pieces that have already survived centuries now falls to the 40 departments employing those 640 staff members, one of whom oversees the Galleria Lapidaria's 3,000-plus tablets that most visitors will never see.