Vatican Museum

Vatican Museum
Originally uploaded by Venkata.

The Rome - Vatican Museums and their immense wealth of art, resulting from centuries of papal collections and commissions, offer an extraordinary experience in which the relevance of the works on display is heightened by the splendour of the structures in which they are displayed, and that are in themselves worth a visit. We do not proceed through buildings designed specifically to allow the large numbers of contemporary visitors to see artistic objects in a functional manner, but we walk through the galleries and rooms of papal palaces, at one time reserved for a small elite. The Museums offer a great variety of collections, including ancient Greek as well as Roman art (of which the Vatican owns the largest collection in the world), Egyptian and Etruscan art and, of course, the great masterpieces of Renaissance art with the frescoes of the Raphael Rooms and the Sistine Chapel. This is a great opportunity to realize how coming to Rome often has more to do with remembering what we have always somehow known, than with discovering things for the first time. Images that are strongly related to the identity of Western artistic culture are here. The restoration of the Sistine Chapel lasted 20 years and revealed the brilliance of the original colours, allowing us to fully enjoy the details of the biblical episodes on the ceiling and of the Last Judgement by Michelangelo, with its almost 400 figures captured in the most dramatic moment in the history of humanity. The Sistine Chapel also contains the famous 15th century frescoes by Botticelli, Perugino and Ghirlandaio, among others.