THE PICTURE GALLERY AND THE GALLERY OF MODERN RELIGIOUS ART
Viale del Vaticano, Città del Vaticano
How to get there:
Underground to Ottaviano
Opening hours:
Monday/Saturday 9-14
Closed on Sunday
During the papacy of Pius VI, in the 1790s, the first Gallery of Pictures was created inside the
Vatican Palaces, in what is now the Gallery of Tapestries. Three large halls housed over a hundred pictures illustrating the history of art since the sixteenth century. Some of the paintings came from the altars in St Peter’s, where they were replaced by copies in mosaic. At the end of the century, with the French occupation, many works were removed from the Picture Gallery and taken to Paris. Only a few of them returned to Rome after the fall of Napoleon, and only then though the efforts of papal delegates such as the famous sculptor Antonio Canova.
In 1817 Pope Pius VII set up a new Picture Gallery in the Borgia Apartments, where the works were put on show to the public. It was at this time that a number of new acquisitions were made, including Raphael’s Sistine Madonna and Transfiguration. During the first half of the nineteenth century the Picture Gallery was moved several times until, toward the end of the century, it was given a new home on the ground floor of the Apostolic Palace, where it is more easily accessible to the public, with good lighting and climatic conditions. The collection has now been enlarged to include a group of works by the so-called primitive painters and to permit its arrangement on the basis of chronology and schools. For a while the Picture Gallery housed an unusual collection that brought the chronological development of sacred art right up to the present day. Thanks to the generosity of a number of artists, including Pirandello, Bacon, Siqueiros, and Chagall, and through the initiative taken during the papacy of John XXIII, the first nucleus of the Gallery of Modern Religious Art was assembled in 1960. Since 1973 it has been housed separately, in the rooms of the Pontifical Apartment on the second floor ­ i.e. the Borgia Apartment ­ and in those on the ground floor and mezzanine under the Sistine Chapel.
