Private Vatican Museums & Sistine Chapel Tour

Ancient sculpture and the Renaissance imagination

Classical sculpture mattered enormously to Renaissance artists, who studied it closely. The Laocoon group was found in Rome in 1506 and was admired by Michelangelo. The Belvedere Torso, a battered fragment of a muscular seated figure, is said to have influenced him as well. Works like these show how antiquity shaped the figures later painted on the Sistine ceiling.

The Pinacoteca: painting on its own

The picture gallery holds a smaller but notable group of paintings, including Raphael's Transfiguration, Caravaggio's Deposition and Leonardo da Vinci's unfinished Saint Jerome. It is a quieter space than many of the corridors, and it is useful for seeing how painters approached religious subjects on panel and canvas rather than on walls.

Raphael's Rooms

The Raphael Rooms were originally apartments for Pope Julius II. Raphael and his workshop decorated them with large frescoes, including the School of Athens. The rooms demonstrate how a Renaissance pope used art to present his ideas about faith, learning and authority.

Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel

The chapel is the highlight for most visitors. Michelangelo's ceiling scenes from Genesis and his later Last Judgment sit in a room that also holds earlier fifteenth-century wall frescoes. Reading the room in layers helps:

• The side walls show earlier stories painted in the late fifteenth century.
• The ceiling shows the creation and early history of humankind.
• The altar wall presents the end of time in a single swirling composition.

Being a thoughtful visitor

Even when the visit is shaped around your own pace, the setting asks for care. Keep voices low, cover shoulders and knees, and do not photograph in the Sistine Chapel. Some visitors find it useful to choose three or four things to look at closely and let everything else go by, instead of trying to take in the whole complex at once.

A great deal of what you see sits in corridors that were never designed as galleries, which is why ceilings, doorways and floors are often as decorated as the objects on display. Tapestries, mosaics and ornamental plasterwork compete for attention, so it pays to decide in advance what matters most to you. History lovers might focus on the Roman collection, while painting enthusiasts might head for Raphael and Michelangelo. Either approach works, and the building is generous enough to reward more than one visit. A short notebook entry or a few photographs of captions in rooms where cameras are allowed can help you remember what you liked, which makes it easier to follow up with a book or documentary afterwards. The great strength of the Vatican is that every gallery leads to another, so curiosity is rarely left without something to chase.