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How the papal collection began

The museums grew around papal chapels, apartments and an expanding collection.

How the papal collection began

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A painted chapel and an excavated statue arrived here for different reasons. Some of the rooms were made for popes to live or pray in. Other spaces were adapted to gather objects and show them to visitors. The Vatican Museums grew through both kinds of history.

Rooms before galleries

In the fifteenth century, Nicholas V commissioned the Niccoline Chapel. Alexander VI later used the rooms known as the Borgia Apartment. Their decoration belonged to the working and religious life of the papal palace. These spaces already had their own purposes before Julius II assembled his antique-statue courtyard.

A courtyard for ancient sculpture

Julius II brought Apollo and Laocoön into the collection. Laocoön had been found in Rome in 1506, and the Pope bought it immediately. The courtyard made excavated ancient bodies part of a papal setting. The paintings and chapels nearby had another origin, commissioned for particular rooms, ceremonies and viewers.

Buildings for visitors and collections

In the eighteenth century, the Pio Clementino adapted existing palace fabric into a public museum. Nineteenth-century museums added other collections. In 1932, a purpose-built Pinacoteca gave the paintings a new home. Each development changed how visitors encountered objects that had once belonged to churches, excavations or papal rooms.

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