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ROME
Museums
Vatican Museums (viale Vaticano)
The Vatican Museums contain the largest collection of antiquities in the world. This itinerary follows that adopted by the Museum Administration: From the Atrium of the Four Gates one arrives at the Gregorian Egyptian Museum, which has eight rooms.
Among the most interesting of the works contained here is the immense statue of the Queen Tuia, mother of Ramses II, and the basalt statue known as Naoforo, from 525 B.C. In the Chiaromonti Museum, organized by Canova in a gallery of Donato Bramante, about a thousand Greek and Roman statues are exposed, including large statues of Minerva, Augustus and Tiberius.
The Pius-Clementine Museum is dedicated primarily to sculpture, the art which most interested Clement XIV. The Gregorian-Etruscan Museum, made up of objects coming from southern Etruria and from private donations, presents one of the most beautiful collections in the world of Etruscan remains.
Advancing sequentially, one finds the Biga Room, the Gallery of the Candalabra, the Arazzi Room and the Maps Room, the apartments of Pius V, the Sobieski Room, the Immaculate Conception Room and the Raphael Rooms. The latter are four large rooms in the apartment of Julius II and his successors up to Gregory XIII, in which the painter from Urbino began to work at the age of 26.
This commission, which marked the debut of Raphael in Rome, concluded in the year of his death, 1520.
Following are the Loggia of Raphael, the Palafrenieri Room, the Chapel of Nicolas V, the Borgia Apartments, the rooms containing the Collection of Modern Religious Art, the Sistine Chapel (see chart), the Vatican Library, the New Wing, the Art Gallery, the Museum Gregoriano Profano, the Christian Museum, the Ethnological Missionary Museum, and the Historical Museum. |
