Vatican
Museums
The first nucleus of the Vatican Museums was the collection
of statues that began to take shelter and to be exposed
under Julio II in the so called "Patio of the Statues",
today "Octagon Patio". Its structure of artistic
collections ordered in areas accessible to the public
it was an idea of Clement XIV and Pius VI. Pius VII extended
it, adding them the Chiaramonti Museum, the Brazo Nuovo
and the Lapidaria Gallery.
Gregory XVI founded the Etruscan Museum in 1837, with
the treasures found in the excavations of southern Etruria
in 1828. He also founded the Egyptian Museum in 1839,
with Egyptian monuments found in excavations in Egypt
and the ones scattered in the galleries of Classical Art
and the Capitolino Museum.
Under the Saint Pius X pontificate, in 1910, it was added
a section that contains 137 inscriptions of old Hebrew
cemeteries of Rome, which were donated by the owners of
the land, Marquises Pellegrini-Quarantotti.
There are also part of the Museum: the Gallery of the
Carpets - collection of carpets of diverse factories,
from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries-; the Gallery
of Maps; the Sobieski rooms and of the Immaculate Conception;
the Sistine Chapel, call thus by its founder Sixtus IV
and one of the most famous postcards of the Vatican; the
Borgia Apartment, old rooms of Alexander VI, restored
and opened to the public in 1897; the Vatican Painting
Gallery, placed by Pius XI in 1932 in the corresponding
Palace, near the entrance of the Museums.
In 1973 the Collection of Modern Religious Art was added,
inaugurated by Paul VI the 23 of June of that same year.
The Historical Museum founded on 1973 was transferred
in 1987 to the Papal Apartment of the Palace of Letrán,
and includes an iconographic series of the Popes, in addition
to objects of the Pontifical Military units and to the
Chapel and Pontifical Family, even to the positions today
suppressed, and a documentation of the ceremonial in disuse.
Vatican City
Rome
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