Vatican Museums

The museums trace their origin to a single purchase. On 14 January 1506 the marble group known as the Laocoön was found in a vineyard near the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome; Julius II sent Giuliano da Sangallo and Michelangelo, both then working at the Vatican, to examine the find, and on their advice he bought the sculpture from the owner of the vineyard at once. A month after its discovery the group, showing the Trojan priest Laocoön and his two sons in the coils of serpents, was put on public display at the Vatican. The foundation of the museums is credited to Julius II from that year, and what they hold is the art accumulated by the popes over the centuries.

Benedict XIV founded the Museum Christianum. It was Clement XIV, however, who had the idea of a new museum in the Belvedere palace of Innocent VIII and began the refurbishment: he founded the Museo Pio-Clementino in 1771, the year the collection was opened to the public, and it first held works of antiquity and of the Renaissance. His successor Pius VI enlarged the museum and its collection and brought it to completion; the museum takes its name from the two of them.

Pius VII, Chiaramonti before his election, founded the museum that bears his family name in the early 19th century, an arcaded gallery of statues, sarcophagi and friezes to which the new wing, the Braccio Nuovo, was added by the architect Stern. Its Galleria Lapidaria holds more than 3,000 stone tablets and inscriptions and is opened only on request, generally for study. Gregory XVI founded both the Etruscan museum, filled from excavations in the territory of the Papal State together with pieces already in the Vatican, and the Egyptian museum, whose papyri, sarcophagi, mummies and Book of the Dead sit alongside the Grassi collection of bronzes. Some of the Vatican holdings went to form the Lateran Museum, founded by decree of Pius IX in 1854.

Pius XI founded the missionary and ethnological museum in 1926, its contents largely religious works from around the world given to the pope. The treaty of 1929 fixed the collection's legal position: the Holy See may not alienate the goods held in the museums and may set the dates and hours of entry, but is bound to allow tourists and scholars to visit, a kind of international servitude. The picture gallery, until then housed in the Borgia Apartment, moved into a building of its own that Pius XI ordered from the architect Luca Beltrami and that was inaugurated on 27 October 1932.

In May 1938 Adolf Hitler came to Rome as the guest of Victor Emmanuel III and Mussolini. Pius XI would not receive him and withdrew for a few days to the villa at Castel Gandolfo to avoid doing so, and, without precedent, ordered that the museums and the basilica be closed to every visitor for the short period of the visit, so that the German leader could not enter Vatican territory even by way of the galleries.

The Collection of Modern Religious Art was added in 1973, bringing in work by Carrà, de Chirico, van Gogh, Gauguin, Chagall, Klee, Dalí and Picasso. The Vatican Historical Museum was founded in the same year at the wish of Paul VI, first housed in rooms beneath the Square Garden; in 1987 it moved to the main floor of the Lateran Palace, where it opened in March 1991.

The holy year of 1925 brought 400,000 visitors and the extraordinary jubilee of 1933 to 1934 brought 425,000; the jubilee of 1950 brought 1,100,000, with peaks of 12,000 people a day. Ordinary years grew too, from 310,000 in 1951 to 600,000 in 1957 and two million a year by 1980, with daily peaks above 18,500. The year the Sistine Chapel restoration ended, 1994, brought about 2.5 million; the Great Jubilee of 2000 brought three million, and the count passed four million in 2007, five million in 2011 and six million in 2015. In 2024 the museums were visited by 6.8 million people, second among the world's art museums after the Louvre. At the start of the 2000 holy year a new entrance was opened in the Vatican walls beside the old one of 1932, one passage for entry and one for exit, and in October 2006 the museums marked their five-hundredth anniversary by opening the excavated necropolis on the Vatican Hill permanently to the public.

Antonio Paolucci directed the museums from 2007 until 1 January 2017, when Barbara Jatta took over as the first woman to hold the post. The collection now runs to roughly 70,000 works, of which 20,000 are shown, and 640 people work in forty administrative, scholarly and restoration departments. Two attacks in 2022 tested that work. On 18 August two members of the climate group Ultima Generazione glued themselves to the marble base of the Laocoön and unfurled a banner calling for an end to fossil fuels while a third filmed; conservationists reported permanent damage to the sculpture, restoration cost 3,148 euros, and a Vatican court gave the three nine-month suspended sentences and fines of up to 28,000 euros. On 5 October an American tourist was arrested after throwing a Roman bust in the Chiaramonti museum and damaging another; Il Messaggero reported that he had acted in anger after being told he could not have an audience with Pope Francis. One bust lost part of a nose and an ear and the other was knocked from its pedestal, and repairs were estimated at 15,000 euros and took some 300 hours.