Visiting Musei Vaticani: the Vatican Museums

When Rome fell, the Catholic Church started collecting art and artefacts and added them to their papal palace - now the Musei Vaticani.

For such a small country, the Vatican Museums are surprisingly huge. They house grandeur on a scale I’ve never seen before. Floors, walls, doorways and ceilings are painted, patterned, gilded, and sculpted, and that’s before you even start to look at the artefacts the rooms contain.

My favourite room is a long corridor with an intricately painted gold moulded stucco ceiling; on the walls are maps of the regions of Italy, painted in 1582. Windows look out onto the gardens of Vatican City.

The ceiling is decorated with plants and animals (including humans), some in moulded plaster with gold relief, some painted in stucco frames. It’s grotesque ornamentation; not ugly or repulsive as I know the word to mean, but grotesque after the Italian grotteschi for the grottoes in which this type of decoration was found in ancient Roman houses.

The palaces of Emperors Augustus and Nero were decorated in the grotesque style, and they were grottoes by the time they were found in the 1500s because they’d been buried by sediment from the Tiber River.

Raphael and his cronies revived the style shortly after its rediscovery and it became popular throughout Europe in the 1600s, especially for fresco (painting on wet plaster).

Like most categories of art, it’s hard for the uninitiated to identify a list of features that label the ceiling as grotesque (perhaps it’s hard for the initiated, too; I wouldn’t know). Common themes of the grotesque seem to be garlands, an abundance of leaves, plants and fruit, mythological creatures and figures, and strange or imaginative (though not necessarily unpleasant) forms.

In the map room ceiling we see human forms with leafy legs, square paintings of birds, human forms with wings, scallop shells with strange decoration, stylised columns and plinths, dragon-like forms, fruit, and plenty of curvy leaves.

The ceiling of the map room

Another fascinating space in the Vatican Museums is the Cortile della Pigna, the Pinecone Courtyard. As the name suggests, Bramante's Renaissance courtyard houses a pinecone. Towering 12 feet high and over 2,000 years old, it’s the most impressive pine cone you’ll ever see.

The pinecone used to stand near the Pantheon to honour Isis, the Egyptian goddess of fertility. The ancient Romans weren’t too fussy with their gods; they weren’t monotheistic (believing in the existence of only one god), they were polytheistic. In fact, they worshipped thousands of gods, and gladly incorporated gods from other cultures and religions into their long list of deities. The Pantheon was a temple for all (‘pan’) the gods (‘theos’).

The pinecone was brought here during the Renaissance, to decorate the pope’s courtyard.

A 2,000-year-old pinecone

The Cortile della Pigna also houses a big, shining ball. A more recent sculpture, put here in 1990, there's no consensus on what it stands for (such lack of consensus is, I suppose, a sign of good art).

After pulling the heavy ball to get it to spin, our tour guide tells us it symbolises a heart. My guidebook ponders whether it symbolises the cosmos, or the eternity it takes to see this huge museum. I see a golden globe with a strip across the middle missing, revealing complexity and intrigue within. On the other side, an inner world is revealed. To me, it symbolises the Eternal City and our history more broadly: the complexity of our past that lies just below the surface, the mysteries of the workings of the ancient world and the extent to which they underpin our present.

Arnaldo Pomodoro's bronze Sfera con Sfera (Sphere within a Sphere)

In the middle of a circular room with an ancient mosaic floor is a massive purple marble dish on lion legs. The room is modelled on the Pantheon interior. Something you’ll notice as you tour Rome is the complex web of links between the sights, despite differences in age or purpose: both tangible links (like pilfered marble) and intangible links (like inspiration).

The round room is the perfect example of the length of time you could spend in each room in the Museums. To appreciate the floor, walls, niches, statues, ceiling, and bowl you’d need an hour here, but the push of the crowd means you’ll probably get five minutes unless you loop back around.

The floor, like many ancient Roman mosaics, depicts battles and fantastic beasts. It’s 1,700 years old and used to sit at the bottom of a Roman swimming pool. Our trainers squeak across tiles that used to be brushed by the bare toes of bathing ancient Romans.

We don’t know what the big bowl was for, but it used to be in Emperor Nero’s palace. It’s made from imperial porphyry, a type of purple marble only found in a single mountain in Egypt. The quarry is exhausted now, so all imperial porphyry is already shaped and polished into something that would have to be destroyed for any new marble sculptures in this shade of purple.

The breadth of time covered by artefacts in the museum allows visitors to track trends, cultural evolution, and inspiration through the ages. Consider, for instance, the fig leaves covering the genitals of many sculptures. These weren't included in original statues, but added in the 16th-19th centuries when the Church decided there were parts of the body that should be hidden. They’re not carved marble fig leaves, they’re cheap and easy plaster covering the sculpted genitals of the earlier age.

Even the genitals of some statues of children were later covered by plaster fig leaves

Change over time, whether because of moralising or just the ravages of the passing years, is a theme throughout the museum. The colourful paints that used to cover the statues are now mostly missing, giving an impression of ancient Rome (and earlier and later periods) as washed-out white and grey, when really the statues would have been almost as colourful as the paintings that now cover the walls and ceilings of the rooms they’re kept in. Freaky empty eye sockets would have been filled by (arguably freakier) glass or ivory eyes or precious stones. The paint and eyes would have made these figures much more lifelike.

The glass eyes allow us to imagine how statues used to look

The highlight of the Vatican Museums for most people is the Sistine Chapel. Michelangelo cricked his neck for four years painting this ceiling depicting the Christian version of the history of the world until Jesus.

The ceiling is stunning, but compared to the opulence of the painted and sculpted rooms of the rest of the Museums, the painting spectacle alone can’t be what makes the Sistine Chapel the highlight. Perhaps it’s the fact that Michelangelo wasn’t a painter, but a sculptor, and initially declined to paint the ceiling. Or perhaps it’s the fact that he did almost all of it himself, painting on wet plaster whilst suspended by scaffolding. After ten minutes of craning your neck to view the ceiling, you’ll understand a fraction of the pain Michelangelo must have been through to deliver his masterpiece. The unveiling of the Sistine Chapel also heralded a change in style in Renaissance art.

There are many hidden stories within the Christian history portrayed in the Sistine Chapel. One of my favourites is in the Last Judgement, painted on the wall with the entry door. The scene depicts heaven near the ceiling, hell towards the floor, and the good and the bad in between. Near the middle, there’s a man, St Bartholomew, holding his own flayed skin - except it bears the face of Michelangelo, perhaps a nod to how painting the Sistine Chapel nearly killed him.

You can see the Church’s later moralising in the Sistine Chapel, just like you can see it in the plaster fig leaves added to statues. After Michelangelo died, the Church had someone paint scraps of clothing over the genitals Michelangelo had painstakingly painted in fresco.

Not the Sistine Chapel (where photos aren't allowed), but an example of the grandeur of the Museums.

Like most sights in Rome, the Vatican Museums stir up an overwhelming cocktail of history and emotion. We walk over marble floors created with marble taken from the facade of ancient Roman monuments in the city, like the Colosseum. We stand transfixed by an open mummy, her mummified face, fingers and toes on display to tourists thousands of kilometres from where she was laid to rest. It seems there are artefacts from all over the world here; some gifted, many forcibly taken or stolen. There is great art in a baffling array of styles and forms and the colour gold shines all around.

Our guide tells us it would take eight full days to see everything in the museums. I’d add that it’d take at least another eight simply to sit and work through the tangled threads of feeling you pick up as you walk around. The awe, the reverence, the sadness.

Practicalities

Always book tickets in advance on the official website. In peak season, the queue to buy tickets at the door is long and slow. You'll get an entry time - try to get one early in the morning - it'll be cooler and less busy, and give you chance to explore as much as you have the energy for.

Cover your legs and shoulders as a sign of respect, particularly in the Sistine Chapel and if you visit St Peter's Basilica.

I had a guided tour, which was fortunate because I’m not known for my speed in museums, and had I been left alone to peruse this collection I'd never have made it past the first few rooms. The place is absolutely enormous. It’s also very hot and busy; by lunchtime, it feels like getting the tube into Canary Wharf during rush hour, so having a guide whip you through the most impressive parts of the museums in the first few hours of the day is useful here even for people who, like me, hate whistle-stop tours.

There are few information signs and no time to stand and read them, so if you don't spring for a Musei Vaticani audio tour, at least find a free audio tour or a guidebook with some information about what you're seeing. I love Rick Steves' guidebook and his free audio tour via his Rick Steves Audio Europe app (this isn't an ad).

You won't see everything. Unless you buy tickets for multiple days, there will probably be entire rooms that you don't get to see. If you get chance, read up on the Museums before you go, so you can be sure to visit the parts that most interest you. If you're following a guided tour or audio tour, don't worry - when it ends, you'll be free to roam the museum at your will.

The experience is incredible but exhausting. There are a few options for food within the Museums (vegetarian options are scarce), but eat and drink before you go.

Enjoy the experience while you're there, but also snap photos. There isn't time to properly appreciate everything you're seeing when you're in the crowd, and it's good to review the photos during slower time (perhaps accompanied by a good book on the Museums).

If you're visiting Rome, read about visiting the Colosseum, Palatine Hill, and the Roman Forum.