Collection of Modern and Contemporary Art

A modern painting can interrupt the expectation that everything here belongs to the distant past. This collection passes through the Borgia Apartment, where fifteenth-century papal decoration surrounds works made much later. Keep the room and the work in view together. They arrived here for different reasons. Pope Paul VI opened the collection in 1973. Nine years earlier, he had met artists in the Sistine Chapel and called for a renewed relationship between the Church and contemporary art. Donations from artists, collectors and institutions helped build the new collection, through work coordinated by his secretary, Pasquale Macchi. The room themes offer several ways to explore it. The Matisse rooms relate to the creation of the Vence Chapel in France. Other rooms group artists such as Van Gogh, Gauguin, Chagall and Morandi, or bring together work from particular countries. You can follow a material, a familiar name or a different treatment of a religious subject. Allow each work its own terms rather than expecting the same gestures and setting as a Renaissance altarpiece.