Vatican Museums

The Vatican Museums in Vatican City lead you through galleries and rooms filled with sculpture, painting, frescoes and mosaics. Their collections bring together art gathered by popes and the Catholic Church across centuries. You move from classical works to Renaissance masterpieces, decorative arts and religious art from more recent periods.

The route includes the Raphael Rooms, where Raphael’s frescoes cover the walls, and the Pinacoteca. There, works by Giotto, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Titian and Caravaggio show the range of Italian painting. Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Marc Chagall, Salvador Dalí and Pablo Picasso appear in the modern religious art collection.

The journey ends in the Sistine Chapel, where Michelangelo painted the ceiling and the altar wall. The altar wall carries The Last Judgment and connects the space with the conclave that elects the popes. One sculpture gives the whole story a memorable beginning: the Laocoön, discovered in a vineyard and displayed soon afterwards. It shows the Trojan priest and his sons struggling against enormous serpents.